As Microsoft bets on OpenAI for artificial intelligence chops, Amazon is spending big money on Anthropic. The company said it will spend another $2.75b backing Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup. Its foundation model and chatbot Claude competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT. In September, there was an initial $1.25b investment.

Amazon needs to provide models through AWS that compete with the OpenAI-powered offerings of Microsoft, and Anthropic is turning out to be a good alternative.

Anthropic began in 2021 by a group of researchers from OpenAI. Back then, many of those researchers were concerned about OpenAI’s getting closer to Microsoft in a partnership eventually worth $13b.

“Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice-president of data and AI at AWS cloud provider.