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STORY: Amazon is escalating the AI race with what may be a $4-billion dollar bet it announced Monday, saying it’s investing in high-profile startup Anthropic.

It's Amazon's biggest answer yet to rivals in cloud computing, like Microsoft and Google.

Anthropic is building generative AI - a system that can draft content as if a human made it - and competes with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Amazon's planned commitment would give its employees and cloud customers early access to technology from Anthropic, which they can infuse into their businesses.

The San Francisco-based startup in turn committed to rely primarily on Amazon's cloud services.

That includes training its future AI models on large quantities of proprietary chips it would buy from Amazon.

Anthropic would also help develop technology for Amazon's own in-house chips.

Amazon's rivals have marketed or developed powerful AI this year.

Since 2019, Microsoft has put billions of dollars into its partnership with Open AI...

Giving Microsoft customers special access to the prose-writing, image-generating ChatGPT and GPT models.

Google, meanwhile, helped pioneer this “generative AI” technology.

In May, it also invested in Anthropic's $450-million fundraise.

And Anthropic says, its relationship with Google is not going away.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI executives.

The startup has yet to gain the name recognition or usage of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, which is one of the fastest-growing software applications in history.

But it has aimed to distinguish its work by training AI to adhere to moral values.

Concerns over security risks and the safety of humanity have soared amid the heated race in the development of artificial intelligence.

In July, U.S. President Joe Biden announced an agreement reached with AI companies on safety guidelines and measures for the technology.