Google LLC is doubling down on its bet on artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic PBC.
The tech titan plans to invest $2 billion in the San Francisco company, an Anthropic representative said. Google has already invested $500 million of that; it plans to invest the remaining $1.5 billion over time, according to the representative.
Google representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the investment earlier on Friday.
The new amount comes on top of the $550 million Alphabet Inc.-owned Google invested in Anthropic earlier this year. It also comes a month after Amazon.com Inc. said it would invest $4 billion in the AI startup, including $1.5 billion up-front.
With the new investment from Google, Anthropic has garnered nearly $7 billion in cash or funding commitments so far this year.
Anthropic has developed a chatbot called Claude and is also working on a set of principles to prevent AI technologies like Claude from harming people.
The company is a kind-of crosstown rival to ChatGPT developer OpenAI LLC. Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, where he had been director of research.
In the wake of OpenAI's debut of ChatGPT last year, the three major cloud service providers — Google, Amazon and Microsoft — have each been racing to embrace the technology. Microsoft earlier this year committed to investing $10 billion total in OpenAI over multiple years.
Months before Google's new investment, Anthropic signed a multiyear, $3 billion contract with the tech giant's Google Cloud unit, according to the Anthropic representative.
