As the e-commerce behemoth competes with Big Tech rivals to profit from generative artificial intelligence technology, Amazon.com (AMZN.O.) opened a new tab and invested an additional $4 billion in OpenAI opponent Anthropic.

Amazon’s stake in the company famed for its GenAI chatbot Claude has doubled, but it is still a minority investor, the business announced on Friday. Like Amazon’s prior $4 billion investment, it is made in installments, starting at $1.3 billion and taking the form of convertible notes.

According to sources who asked not to be named in order to discuss private topics, Anthropic is also in discussions with other investors in order to raise more money with Amazon’s support.

Amazon, which has steadily become Anthropic’s main cloud partner, is in intense competition with Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) to provide AI-powered tools for its cloud clients. As a major distributor of its most recent models, AWS is generating a substantial amount of revenue for Anthropic.

“The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI,” Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, stated.

The increased investment by the e-commerce giant in Anthropic highlights the billions of dollars that have been invested in AI startups in the past year as investors seek to profit from the technology’s surge in popularity following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

Last month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI collected $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion and solidifying its place among the world’s most valuable private enterprises.

Anthropic intends to use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and implement its core models. Securing expensive AI chips is a big concern for startups since the rigorous process of training AI models demands powerful processors.

“It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using,” Luria stated.

Amazon is one of the many so-called hyperscaler clients of Nvidia (NVDA.O), which opens a new tab and presently controls the market for AI chips.

However, through its Annapurna Labs branch, which Anthropic stated it was “working closely with” to help create CPUs, Amazon has been striving to develop its own chips. Additionally, Amazon has been working on developing its own AI model, code-named “Olympus,” which it has not yet made public.

Anthropic, which was co-founded by brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, former executives at OpenAI, said last year that it had obtained a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which pledged to contribute an additional $1.5 billion over time.

The startup’s operations also make advantage of Alphabet’s Google Cloud capabilities.

Wiz revealed on Thursday that it will buy channel-focused company Dazz in an agreement to add cloud remediation capabilities to the vendor’s cloud and AI security platform.

With features like application security posture management and continuous threat and exposure management, Dazz provides a remediation-focused cloud security platform.

Jared Phipps, a seasoned cybersecurity industry executive who most recently worked for SentinelOne, was hired by Dazz in February as its CRO as the business sought to expand its collaboration with channel partners. Presidio, situated in New York, has been one of the key partners.

Dazz said in July that it has raised a $50 million round of funding, increasing its total funding since its 2021 launch to $110 million.

Dazz provides a “industry-leading remediation engine,” according to a post published on Thursday by Wiz Co-Founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, which will allow Wiz to “empower security teams to correlate data from multiple sources and manage application risks in one unified platform.”

This is Wiz’s third purchase overall and its second acquisition of 2024 after the company’s April acquisition of cloud detection and response provider Gem Security.

Wiz, a four-year-old startup, reported in May that it had raised $1 billion in new capital at a $12 billion valuation, citing its continued strong development in the cloud and AI security areas. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the business reportedly increased from $350 million earlier this year to above $500 million.

After making a number of management additions aimed at facilitating quicker partner-driven growth, Rappaport stated in February that Wiz would prioritize its channel operations moving ahead.

I“In cybersecurity partners are super, super important in the success of a company. So we’ve always [seen that] this has huge potential for us to tap into. I think there is so much more we can do,” he stated at the time.

Arjun Nittoor, the founder of the Indian technology firm Vireza, disclosed at Film Bazaar that the company is creating a new mobile application that would transform the experience of watching movies in theaters by enabling viewers to engage with the films in real time.

The technology, which was created wholly in-house at the company’s research and development department in Bengaluru, allows viewers to use their smartphones to vote on important plot points during the movie. To keep up with the current screening, patrons download an app before entering the theater and scan a QR code at their seat.

“The film industry is one of the few sectors where the audience experience has seen minimal technological disruption in theatres,” Nittoor stated. “While screen and sound quality have advanced and 3D has been partially adopted, the viewing experience has largely remained the same for decades.”

The screen automatically brightens to show voting options and dims again when choices are made. The system uses discreet phone notifications to encourage audience participation around every ten minutes.

In 2026, Vireza intends to introduce the technology with a full-length interactive movie that will be produced in both English and South Indian for international distribution. The business is presently in the development stage and will shortly start doing multiplex chain trial screenings.

CtrlMovie’s prior success in the interactive film industry was mentioned by Nittoor. CtrlMovie is well-known for “Traces of Responsibility” and “Late Shift.”

In order to overcome the difficulties in cinematography, editing, shot composition, and writing that plagued previous attempts at the format, the firm has spent five years creating what Nittoor refers to as “a new science of filmmaking” that is especially tailored for interactive cinema.

“Despite the proliferation of viewing devices, big-ticket films continue to draw massive crowds to theatres, with box office numbers higher than ever,”  Nittoor stated. “This demand underscores the potential for a meaningful technology shift that could draw audiences out of their homes and into cinemas.”

Other Asian businesses are likewise investigating audience-driven narrative in motion pictures. In February of the following year, Japan’s King Records intends to release “Hypnosis Mic – Division Rap Battle,” an animated interactive film.