The puzzling thing is why Google would try to help with that. Aren't they competitors? Wouldn't they want their competitor to have problems?

It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.

There's always three:

   Google buys Anthropic.
   Microsoft buys Open AI (or vice versa depending on how things go).
   SpaceGrok buys Cursor, limps along in 3rd place.
   Meta is the last man standing, get's stuck with Oracle, dies.

And then hopefully some open source models save us from this nightmare before China commadatises everything.

Edit: I forgot Amazon. Who knows what they will do. They're the wildcard anyway.

OpenAI buying Microsoft.. I honestly think I'd like to see that.

Anything to invigorate the desktop.

Microsoft buying OpenAI.. 10 minutes later it's rebranded Copilot.. and.. nothing much changes in the world. Oh, except all the AI improvements are around Enterprise governance.

I hate how plausible this is

Google owned 14ish percent of Anthropic before this investment, so presumably this could bring it up to as much as 25%?

Deepmind is heavily using Claude. This could help secure computing power.

I'm not up to date, I think. How so?

There's been a spat between some people on X, about how few engineers inside Google want to work with Gemini, given that it apparently is not great with code, and they would rather use Claude.

This same sentiment is there within Deepmind, except they have more power it seems. Perhaps Google is hedging their bet?

Best non-X link I could find: https://benzatine.com/news-room/internal-strife-at-google-th...

What if Google can't compete? They don't want to be left behind and all this money being throw around is just nonsense anyway.

Google was already an investor in Anthropic but I don’t think they are truly competitors in this space.