AI Startup Anthropic Says Partnerships Give It Greater Independence

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic has defended its decisions to partner with Amazon and Google, saying that collaborating with two companies gives it greater independence than it would have if it teamed up with only one.

“That independence and that choice is one thing that I think differentiates Anthropic from some of these other deals,” Anthropic Co-Founder and CEO Dario Amodei said, according to a Thursday (May 9) report by Bloomberg.

Interviewed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit, Amodei said Anthropic is not as closely tied to a single large investor as OpenAI is with Microsoft, per the report.

These comments come at a time when regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom are looking into the impact that the largest investments made by tech giants in AI startups may have on competition in the marketplace, the report said.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft have invested billions in companies in this sector, providing both financing and cloud computing resources, according to the report.

In the case of Anthropic, Google has agreed to invest $2 billion into the firm and Amazon will invest $4 billion, the report said.

PYMNTS reported April 24 that the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was asking for input from stakeholders by May 9 to determine whether the partnerships between Microsoft and Amazon and smaller generative AI model developers should be classified as mergers.

This request for comments is an initial step in the information-gathering phase, which precedes the start of a formal Phase 1 investigation by U.K. regulators. However, this request does not initiate the formal review.

The European Union (EU) has also been scrutinizing the tech industry, with the EU’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager expressing concern about Big Tech companies’ investments in AI startups.

After meeting with French AI firm Mistral AI on April 26, Vestager wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter): “If we act early on, we can avoid that the #AI market gets dominated by a few large players, like we saw happening with #digital #platforms. We need vibrant #competition in AI, now.”

In Thursday’s Bloomberg report, Amodei also said that while it currently costs $100 million to train AI models, he expects it to cost $100 billion in the future.