Anthropic forms a new team to grow its AWS business

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In a sign of Anthropic’s increasingly cozy relationship with Amazon, Anthropic has formed a new team to recruit AWS customers to use its AI products.

The team, which Anthropic appears to have begun hiring several months ago, aims to “accelerate” the adoption of Anthropic’s AI among AWS accounts by “building programs that […] scale across global markets and segments.” That’s according to job listings on Anthropic’s website and job boards around the web.

“[Y]ou will own and scale one of our most significant strategic relationships, leading a team responsible for multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities through our AWS partnership,” reads a listing for a Head of Amazon GTM Partnership role. “You will work closely with senior leadership across both organizations to drive joint success [and] shape strategy.”

Amazon is a major backer of Anthropic, having committed $8 billion in capital to the startup to date. While the company has no governance rights and is a minority investor, Amazon is Anthropic’s “primary” training partner, providing in-house chips to help Anthropic develop its AI models.

Anthropic has also optimized its models to run on AWS infrastructure, releasing models with capabilities exclusive to Bedrock, AWS’ AI development platform. And the company has launched collaborations with Amazon partners, including Accenture and Palantir, to facilitate access to its AI tech through AWS.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in November that Anthropic’s Claude family of models was being used by “tens of thousands” of Bedrock customers.

Amazon, which is leveraging Anthropic technology to power components of its revamped Alexa experience, Alexa+, no doubt sees Anthropic as important to its overall AI business’ growth. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently claimed that Amazon’s AI revenue is growing at “triple-digit” year-over-year percentages and represents a “multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate.”

Anthropic, meanwhile, stands to benefit from AWS’ reach as it looks to grow its own revenue. The startup is reportedly aiming to notch $12 billion in revenue in 2027, up from a projected $2.2 billion this year.

Amazon’s dealings with Anthropic have attracted some regulatory scrutiny.

The FTC last year sent a letter to Amazon, as well as to Microsoft and Google, requiring the companies to explain the impacts their investments in startups such as Anthropic have on the competitive AI landscape. Google has also invested in Anthropic, pouring billions into the company over multiple funding rounds.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has also investigated Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic, looking at whether key aspects would result in “Amazon having material influence” over the latter.

The FTC this year published a report finding that AI investments by Big Tech firms can create lock-in and reveal sensitive information that can undermine competition, but stopped short of recommending enforcement action. The CMA, for its part, concluded that Amazon’s partnership and equity investment in Anthropic can’t be investigated under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal.