Amazon Is Betting Big On The 'Good Guy' Of AI: Here's What That Means For You

In the highly competitive world of artificial intelligence, alliances are being made. Despite having had its own AI products for some time now, Amazon has formed a close collaboration with Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The newest iteration of Amazon's voice assistant Alexa, known now as Alexa+, is partly powered by Anthropic's Claude. A team from Anthropic worked on Alexa+ development to integrate "the full benefits of Claude's capabilities."

The partnership between Amazon and Anthropic began in 2023 when it was announced that Amazon was investing $4 billion in Anthropic. In exchange, Anthropic committed to using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's giant cloud computing platform, as its primary cloud provider. In November 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion. This time, Anthropic committed to using Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia AI chips as part of the deal.

At first glance, it's an unlikely marriage. Anthropic was formed when seven OpenAI employees defected over concerns about safety, including Vice President of Research Dario Amodei, now Anthropic's CEO. They've been considered the 'Good Guys' of AI, putting safety before profits and unfettered AI progress. Will they be able to retain their reputation while in bed with Tech Titan like Amazon?

So, what improvements has Anthropic's involvement brought to the latest iteration of Alexa? As of the time of writing, two weeks after Alexa+'s early access release date of 31st March, nobody can say for sure yet. There are no first-hand reviews online, either in the press or on social media. Tech journalists are mostly quoting this Washington Post article for information about what is and isn't included. But the Post is getting its information from "internal company documents" they've seen. They've not tested Alexa+ either. Some tech news sites are appealing to readers to see if any of them have got it yet, but no one seems to be having any luck.

Release delays aren't unusual in the tech world, however, and there's no indication that Alexa+ is going to be delayed indefinitely. We should soon be able to try Alexa's new iteration, which Amazon says will be smarter, more conversational, and more personalized than its predecessor. Alexa+ accesses Claude through Bedrock, an Amazon service that provides access to machine learning models from multiple AI providers. Claude was added to Bedrock in March 2024.

What do Amazon and Anthropic plan to do next? It seems like they have big plans. At last year's AWS re:Invent conference, CEO Matt Garman announced plans for a supercomputer. Nicknamed Project Rainier, this is a collaborative initiative between AWS and Anthropic to construct a cluster of servers using hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Trainium2 chips with five times the computing power of Anthropic's current Claude models. Garman said he was "super excited to see what the Anthropic team come up with, with that size cluster."

While Amazon and Anthropic's official statements are full of promises of how the collaboration will "keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies", they're less forthcoming on what is presumably the main advantage of the partnership: they want to beat OpenAI. ChatGPT is still the most popular AI tool. According to market analytics from AITools.xyz, ChatGPT had more visits to its site in February 2025 than the next twenty most popular AI tools combined. To become a serious competitor, Amazon needs Anthropic's AI know-how, and Anthropic needs Amazon's money. However, concerns are being raised about big tech partnerships. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report raising concerns that AI partnerships – including the Amazon-Anthropic partnership – could reduce competition and exclude rival developers, leading to higher prices, reduced innovation, and a lack of transparency. 

That's not to say there mightn't be potential benefits for us consumers. The partnership could make smart technology more useful, affordable, and available to more people by enabling both Amazon and Anthropic to deliver faster, more powerful AI tools like Claude with improved stability and performance. These Redditors, however, remain skeptical. One writes, "Whenever an independent company builds something especially impressive or innovative, the tech giants will swallow it up with their massive budgets," and another comments, "Anthro being the 'ethical AI' company does not jibe with going all-in with Amazon."