Amazon says Anthropic remains outside the defense function

Amazon It said Friday that it will continue to offer Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology to its cloud customers, except for work involving the Department of Defense.

The announcement comes after the federal agency told Anthropic on Thursday that it would label the company a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic responded by saying it had “no choice” but to challenge the designation in court.

“AWS customers and partners can continue to use the cloud for all their workloads that are not related to the Department of War (DoW),” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement. “For all DoW workloads using Anthropic technologies, we are supporting customers and partners to transition to alternatives running on AWS.”

Amazon, the leader in the public cloud, is chasing top competitors Microsoft And Google In updating customers on the availability of Anthropic. Microsoft said late Thursday that Anthropic’s cloud models could be embedded in its products outside of defense work, and Google made a similar statement earlier Friday.

Amazon is one of Anthropic’s biggest financial backers, investing $8 billion in the startup through 2023. The two companies have also forged a strong commercial relationship.

AWS remains Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner. Anthropic has committed to using 500,000 of Amazon’s custom-made chips, called Trinium 2, as part of an $11 billion AWS data center campus built for the startup, known as Project Rainier.

Anthropic’s cloud models are available through AWS Bedrock, which allows companies to tap into artificial intelligence models built by various providers.

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