Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into AI startup Anthropic, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

The new tranche of money from Google into Anthropic adds to a total investment of $8bn from Amazon, the ecommerce group’s largest-ever venture investment, announced over the past 18 months. Amazon is also working to embed the Claude models into the next-generation version of its Alexa speaker.

The cash infusion comes on top of the $2 billion that Google has already provided to the artificial intelligence developer. Separately, Anthropic is said to be raising $2 billion from a group of institutional investors led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The latter deal is expected to value the company at $60 billion.

It is no secret that Google is interested in artificial intelligence. The company has made several announcements over the years. It felt like the company was at the forefront of things, but only when OpenAI kicked in the door with ChatGPT did the AI race truly kick off.