San Francisco, Oct 28 (IANS): Google is reportedly investing $2 billion in AI startup company Anthropic, founded by former members of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, as the AI race heats up.

The funding deal involves $500 million now and up to $1.5 billion later, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Google was yet to comment on the development.

In April, Google invested $300 million in the company, taking a 10 per cent stake.

In September, Amazon said it will invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic with a minority ownership position in the company, as competition grows in the growing generative AI market ruled by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Anthropic is the developer of Claude 2, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Claude 2 scores above the 90th percentile on the GRE reading and writing exams, and similarly on quantitative reasoning.

Anthropic was one of four companies invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss responsible AI development with US Vice President Kamala Harris, along with Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models, benefitting from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS.

As of July 2023, Anthropic had raised $1.5 billion in funding.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former senior members of OpenAI, principally Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research.