This isn't just loose change from down the back of the sofa – it's Amazon's heftiest punt outside its empire in 30 years.

The tech titan's not stopping there, oh no. They've already lobbed €1.13 billion at these brainiacs last September and are gearing up to hurl as much as €3.62 billion their way. This latest cash injection is just the second slice of the pie.

However, Amazon's playing it cool, keeping just a minority stake and steering clear of the boardroom shenanigans at Anthropic. But let's talk numbers – the deal's been done at a dizzying valuation of €16.7 billion.

In the past year alone, Anthropic has been raking it in, with five funding frenzies totalling about €6.63 billion. Their pride and joy, the chatbot Claude, is squaring up to ChatGPT, ready to duke it out for the top spot in the AI smackdown.

JAnthropic has dropped Claude 3, its latest and greatest AI brainchild. It boasts that it's quicker and beefier than anything OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's Gemini Ultra can muster, smashing through tests like a hot knife through butter.

AWS  Big Kahuna of Data and AI Swami Sivasubramanian said that this generative AI lark is set to flip the tech world on its head.

Meanwhile, Amazon's splurge is just the latest in a cash cannonade among cloud bigwigs, all scrambling to stay ahead in the AI arms race.