Anthropic – the AI company embroiled in a copyright lawsuit against several major music publishers – has announced it has received another $4 billion investment from online retail and web services giant Amazon.
That brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, when including a $4 billion investment announced in September 2023.
In announcing the new investment, Anthropic said it will be using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its “primary cloud and training partner.”
According to a report at The Information earlier this month, Anthropic has been using AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to design, train and deploy its AI tech.
In a statement issued on Friday (November 22), Anthropic said it’s “working closely” with AWS’s Annapurna Labs “to extract maximum computational efficiency from the [Trainium] hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models.”
Google owner Alphabet is also a major investor in Anthropic. The tech giant committed last year to investing up to $2 billion into the AI company. According to Pitchbook, the company has raised $12.8 billion so far.
Anthropic has a high rate of cash burn. According to a separate report at The Information, the company expects to spend $2.7 billion this year developing its AI technologies.
The investments from Amazon and Alphabet come as the company faces off with music publishers Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO over alleged copyright infringement.
In a lawsuit filed in a US federal court last year, the three publishers alleged that Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot produced copyrighted lyrics in response to user requests, including for songs such as American Pie by Don McLean, I Am the Walrus by The Beatles, and Mad About You by Sting.
The complaint against Anthropic also alleged that Claude will sometimes regurgitate copyrighted lyrics even when it’s asked to produce some other kind of content, such as poetry.
In August of this year, Anthropic filed a motion with the court to dismiss three of the four charges against it brought by the music publishers.
It asked the court to remove claims of “contributory” copyright infringement, “vicarious” copyright infringement, and “removal or alteration of copyright management information,” a violation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
That would leave just one claim against the company – that of direct copyright infringement. On that charge, earlier comments by Anthropic suggest the company plans to argue, among other things, that it is protected by the US’s “fair use” exemptions to copyright law.
In September, Universal, Concord, and ABKCO urged the court to reject Anthropic’s request for dismissal.
“Responsible AI companies seek to license content; Anthropic should do the same.”
Matt Oppenheim, Oppenheim + Zebrak
“Anthropic’s latest motion is completely without merit and is yet another example of an AI company seeking to avoid taking responsibility for its massive infringement of copyrights,” a lawyer for the publishers, Matt Oppenheim of Oppenheim + Zebrak, told MBW.
“Responsible AI companies seek to license content; Anthropic should do the same.”
Anthropic has made its Claude chatbot available through Amazon Bedrock, an AWS service that enables companies to use technologies from various AI developers, including Meta, Mistral, and Stability AI.
Through Amazon Bedrock, Claude has been used by companies including Pfizer, “to accelerate research and delivery timelines for critical medicines, while saving tens of millions in operational costs,” Anthropic said.
Tax software firm Intuit uses Claude, via Bedrock, “to explain complex tax calculations for millions of users during tax season,” and the European Parliament “leverages Claude to power ‘Archibot’, making 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and easier to analyze in multiple languages while reducing research time by 80%.”Music Business Worldwide
