In 2021, a group of engineers abandoned OpenAI, concerned that the pioneering artificial intelligence company had become too focused on making money. Instead, they formed Anthropic, a public-benefit corporation dedicated to creating responsible AI. This week, the do-gooders at Anthropic threw in with a surprisingly corporate partner, announcing a deal with Amazon worth up to $4 billion. The arrangement highlights how AI’s insatiable need for computing power is pushing even the most anti-corporate start-ups into the arms of Big Tech. Before Anthropic announced Amazon as its “preferred” cloud partner, it boasted in February of a similar relationship with Google. (Anthropic’s February blog post no longer has the word “preferred.”) Spokespeople for both companies said Google and Anthropic’s relationship is unchanged. The AI boom is widely seen as the next revolution in technology, with the potential to catapult a new wave of start-ups into the Silicon Valley stratosphere. But instead of breaking Big Tech’s decade-long dominance of the internet economy, the AI boom so far appears to be playing into its hands. Big Tech’s warehouses of powerful computer chips are necessary to train the complex algorithms behind AI chatbots, giving Amazon, Google and Microsoft immense sway over the market. And while upstarts like Anthropic AI may have created powerful breakthrough tech, they still need Big Tech’s money and cloud computing resources to make it work.
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