Google LLC is expected to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic PBC, an OpenAI LP competitor focused on developing large language models.

The Wall Street Journal reported the deal this morning. It’s believed that Google will provide $500 million upfront and invest the rest over time. Using the new funding, Anthropic can more easily pursue its reported goal of building a large model “10 times more capable” than the artificial intelligence products on the market today. 

Anthropic was launched in 2021 by former OpenAI engineering executives. Its flagship offering is a large language model called Claude-2 that lends itself to many of the same use cases such as ChatGPT. It can write prose, generate software code and perform reasoning tasks such as solving math problems.

Anthropic also offers a second language model called Claude Instant. It has a more limited feature set than Claude 2, but costs less and offers faster response times. Anthropic’s two models are available through an application programming interface that developers can integrate into their software, as well as a web-based chatbot.

The company has sought to set its models apart from OpenAI’s ChatGPT by equipping them with the ability to ingest a large amount of data at once. According to Anthropic, users can include up to 70,000 words in prompts they enter into Claude Instant and Claude 2. This allows the models to perform tasks such as summarizing entire books that would be difficult to achieve with rival products.

The $2 billion funding round detailed by the Journal today isn’t Google’s first investment in Anthropic. The Alphabet Inc. unit first became an investor last year, when it reportedly paid $300 million for a 10% stake. This past May, the search giant participated in a $450 million funding round for Anthropic also included contributions from Salesforce Ventures and other backers.

Google’s latest investment comes only weeks after Anthropic secured a funding round worth up to $4 billion from Amazon.com Inc. The online retail and cloud computing will invest about a third of that sum upfront.

As part of the deal, Anthropic has named Amazon Web Services Inc. its preferred cloud provider. The AI developer intends to run the majority of its workloads on AWS, including language model development projects. Anthropic will use instances powered by the Amazon unit’s internally developed AI training and inference chips to support its research.

In May, prior to the new investments from Google and Amazon, it was reported that Anthropic was seeking to raise funding at a $4.1 billion valuation. The company is now likely worth considerably more. However, its valuation may not yet be as high as that of rival OpenAI, which is reportedly gearing up for a secondary stock sale at a valuation exceeding $80 billion. 

Image: Anthropic