Anthropic’s rival version of ChatGPT, called Claude, could help Amazon keep pace with other big tech companies such as Microsoft and Google in the AI race. 

Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon will invest an initial $1.25bn (£1.02bn) for a minority stake in San Francisco-based Anthropic, which could increase to as much as $4bn (£3.3bn).

Anthropic plans to raise as much as $5bn (£4.01bn) over the next two years, according to TechCrunch. The company was founded in 2021 by former research executives from ChatGPT developer OpenAI. 

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. The company is also expected to use AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models. 

Meanwhile, Amazon said it would use the Claude technology to evolve its voice assistant Alexa and improve...