Why Did Google Partner With Anthropic?

Sundar Pichai says Google partnered with Anthropic because, very early, the founding team looked world-class and had been involved in some of the earliest GPT models. Google could tell quickly that they would be at the frontier. The habit is to identify companies at the cutting edge of technology and partner when the chance is there. SpaceX is the other example he names. Some of those partnerships also took shape around Google's TPUs.

Alex Kantrowitz puts Google's commitment at tens of billions of dollars invested. Pichai does not discuss that figure. He describes the decision as recognizing a frontier team and taking the chance to partner.