The new tranche of money from Google into Anthropic adds to a total investment of $8 billion 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 AI contender to the apparent market leader finished a $2 million funding round and now has a $60 billion valuation.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is backing artificial intelligence developer Anthropic with a further $1 billion, building its stake in one of the most promising rivals to OpenAI.