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Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Google has agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC.

The fresh funding builds on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.

The agreement comes as Anthropic, one of the key players in Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence arms race, is in late-stage talks to raise a funding round of $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, CNBC reported earlier this month.

In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, the source said. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales.

Financial Times was first to report Google’s investment.

Anthropic, which has been backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.

The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.

Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That brought Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat.

As part of that investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic has used Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models since then.

Anthropic ramped up its technology development throughout last year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.

The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”

OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

Anthropic debuted Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its more powerful AI model, in June, and the startup rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since the launch of its chatbot, in September.

WATCH: Anthropic CEO: More confident than ever that we’re ‘very close’ to powerful AI capabilities

Anthropic CEO: More confident than ever that we're 'very close' to powerful AI capabilities

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Tech stocks set for big losing week as AI names get rocked after Nvidia earnings

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Tech stocks set for big losing week as AI names get rocked after Nvidia earnings

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO, has a Q&A session at a press conference during the APEC CEO summit on October 31, 2025 in Gyeongju, South Korea.

Woohae Cho | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang couldn’t save the tech and artificial intelligence trade this week.

The chip giant’s talismanic leader trumpeted “off the charts” chip sales and dismissed talk of an “AI bubble,” and for a while, the tide lifted all boats.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said during an earnings call this week. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”

The buzz from the blowout report quickly reversed, sending the AI winners deeply into the red — and few beneficiaries were left unscathed.

Every member of the Magnificent 7, except for Alphabet, was tracking for a losing week, with Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft staring down the biggest losses.

Amazon and Microsoft have led the group’s drop lower, falling about 6% this week. Meanwhile, Alphabet has gained nearly 8%. The search giant is also the only megacap of the group on pace for November gains thanks to a boost from the launch of Gemini 3.

Oracle, which is another major Nvidia customer, slumped about 10%. The chipmaker also supplies major model developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Read more CNBC tech news

Chip stocks have also declined amid the broader tech market turmoil. Advanced Micro Devices and Micron were on pace for 17% losses. Marvell Technology has slumped about 10%. Quantum computing stocks Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave have dropped at least 10%

CoreWeave, which buys and rents out Nvidia’s chips in data centers, initially soared on the chipmaker’s earnings report, but swiftly reversed course. The company’s stock is looking at an 8% blow this week.

AI fever was cooling in the runup to Nvidia’s earnings report on Wednesday, and investors looked to the print to alleviate fears that the AI bubble was on shaky ground. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the stock has helped power the market to new all-time highs.

But concerns have mounted in recent weeks as tech stocks hit stretched valuations.

Major investors, including Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio told CNBC Thursday that the market is definitely in a bubble.

Much of the worries have stemmed from a boom in capital expenditures spending to support AI, with few signs of a payoff in view for many of the players.

Investor Michael Burry recently accused some of the biggest cloud and infrastructure providers of understating depreciation expenses and estimating a longer life cycle for their chips, calling it “one of the more common frauds of the modern era.”

Earlier this month, Burry revealed bets against Nvidia and Palantir.

Shares of the software analytics company, which supplies AI tools to the government and businesses, are down 11% this week. The stock has shed nearly a quarter of its value this month.

WATCH: Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio: We are definitely in a bubble, but that doesn’t mean you should sell

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio: We are definitely in a bubble, but that doesn't mean you should sell

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Amazon cut thousands of engineers in its record layoffs, despite saying it needs to innovate faster

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Amazon cut thousands of engineers in its record layoffs, despite saying it needs to innovate faster

The Amazon Puget Sound Headquarters is pictured on Oct. 28, 2025 in Seattle, Washington.

Stephen Brashear | Getty Images

Amazon‘s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers.

Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon’s home state of Washington showed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles. The data was reported by Amazon in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filings to state agencies.

The figures represent a segment of the total layoffs announced in October. Not all data was immediately available because of differences in state WARN reporting requirements.

In announcing the steepest round of cuts in its 31-year history, Amazon joined a growing roster of tech companies that have slashed jobs this year even as cash piles have mounted and profits soared. In total, there have been almost 113,000 job cuts at 231 tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi, continuing a trend that began in 2022 as businesses readjusted to life after the Covid pandemic.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been on a multiyear mission to transform the company’s corporate culture into one that operates like what he calls “the world’s largest startup.” He’s looked to make Amazon leaner and less bureaucratic by urging staffers to do more with less and cutting organizational bloat.

Amazon is expected to carry out further job reductions in January, CNBC previously reported.

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc., speaks during an unveiling event in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The company said it’s also shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence. The technology is already poised to reshape Amazon’s white-collar workforce, with Jassy predicting in June that its corporate head count will shrink in the coming years alongside efficiency gains from AI.

Human resources chief Beth Galetti, in her memo announcing the layoffs, focused on the importance of innovating, which the company will now have to do with fewer people, specifically engineers.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti wrote. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

Amazon said in a statement that AI is not the driver behind the vast majority of the job cuts, and that the bigger goal was to reduce bureaucracy and emphasize speed.

Jassy said on Amazon’s earnings call last month that the cuts were in response to a “culture” issue inside the company, spurred in part by an extended hiring spree that left it with “a lot more layers” and slower decision-making.

The layoffs impacted a mix of software engineer levels, but SDE II roles, or mid-level employees, were disproportionately affected, the WARN filings show.

The AI boom is making software development jobs harder to come by as companies adopt coding assistants or so-called vibe coding platforms from vendors like Cursor, OpenAI and Cognition. Amazon has released its own competitor called Kiro.

Read more CNBC tech news

‘Significant role reductions’

Amazon spends billions on AI arms race as it guts corporate ranks

Game designers, artists and producers made up more than a quarter of the total cuts in Irvine, and they were roughly 11% of staffers laid off at Amazon’s San Diego offices, according to filings.

The company also told staffers it’s halting much of its work on big-budget, or triple A, game development, specifically around massively multiplayer online, or MMO, games, Boom wrote. Amazon has released MMOs including Crucible and New World. It was also developing an MMO based on “Lord of the Rings.”

Beyond its gaming division, Amazon also significantly cut back its visual search and shopping teams, according to multiple employee posts on LinkedIn. The unit is responsible for products like Amazon Lens and Lens Live, AI shopping tools that enable users to find products via their camera in real time or images saved to their device. The company rolled out Lens Live in September.

The team was primarily based in Palo Alto, California, and Amazon’s WARN filings indicate that software engineers, applied scientists and quality assurance engineers were heavily impacted across its offices there.

Amazon’s online ad business, one of its biggest profit centers, was downsized as well. More than 140 ad sales and marketing roles were eliminated across Amazon’s New York offices, accounting for about 20% of the roughly 760 positions cut, according to state documents viewed by CNBC.

WATCH: Box joining AWS marketplace in new partnership

AI's impact on reshaping the workforce

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The market’s surprising reversal, Gap’s viral ad, AI regulation and more in Morning Squawk

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The market's surprising reversal, Gap's viral ad, AI regulation and more in Morning Squawk

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

1. Hero to zero

Stock investors didn’t end up getting the post-Nvidia earnings market bounce they hoped for. After opening yesterday’s trading session higher, stocks took a dramatic midday tumble, once again casting doubt on the artificial intelligence trade.

Here’s what to know:

  • Nvidia shares gave up their 5% post-earnings gain, ending the session down more than 3% despite the chipmaker’s blockbuster quarterly results and guidance. The AI darling’s stock is on track to finish the week down 5%.
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average swung more than 1,100 between its session highs and lows. All three major averages closed solidly in the red, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ending the day down 2.15%.
  • Meanwhile, the CBOE Volatility Index — better known as Wall Street’s fear gauge — ended the session at a level not seen since April.
  • Bitcoin fell to lows going back to April, further illustrating the shift away from risk assets.
  • Before stocks’ midday reversal, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told CNBC that “we are in that territory of a bubble,” but that you don’t need to sell stocks because of it.
  • The three major indexes are all on track to end the week in the red.
  • Follow live markets updates here.

2. Prediction market

A ‘Now Hiring’ sign is posted outside of a business on Oct. 3, 2025 in Miami, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

The belated September jobs report was finally released yesterday, and the headline number was much hotter than economists expected with an increase of 119,000 jobs. On the other hand, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, its highest level since 2021.

The chance of a rate cut at the Federal Reserve’s next meeting remained low after the report, according to the CME FedWatch Tool. But the odds flipped this morning after New York Fed President John Williams said he sees “room for a further adjustment” in interest rates, reviving hopes of a December cut.

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3. Better than yours

Merchandise on display in a Gap store on November 21, 2024 in Miami Beach, Florida. 

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Gap‘s “Milkshake” ad brought all the shoppers to the store. The retailer’s viral “Better in Denim” campaign with girl group Katseye helped drive comparable sales up 5% in its third quarter, beating analyst expectations.

The Old Navy and Banana Republic parent also surpassed Wall Street’s estimates on both the top and bottom lines, sending shares rising 4.5% in overnight trading. Athleta was the notable outlier, with the athleisure brand’s sales falling 11%.

Gap’s report comes at the end of a busy week for retail earnings. As CNBC’s Melissa Repko reports, one key theme of this quarter’s results has been that value-oriented retailers are winning favor with shoppers across income brackets.

4. AI in D.C.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House on Oct. 6, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

The White House is putting together an executive order that would thwart states’ individual AI laws. A draft obtained by CNBC shows the order would focus on staging legal challenges and blocking federal funding for states to ensure their compliance.

The draft would work to the advantage of many AI industry leaders who have pushed back on a state-by-state approach to the technology’s regulation. A White House official told CNBC that any discussion around the draft is speculation until an official announcement.

Click here to read the full draft.

5. Flight fight

Courtesy: Archer Aviation

Joby Aviation is taking air taxi competitor Archer Aviation to court. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Joby accused Archer of using information stolen by a former employee to “one-up” a deal with a real estate developer.

Joby alleges that George Kivork, its former U.S. state and local policy lead, took files and information before jumping to the competitor in an act of “corporate espionage.” Archer called the case “baseless litigation” and said it’s “entirely without merit.”

The Daily Dividend

Here are our recommendations for stories to circle back to this weekend:

CNBC’s Liz Napolitano, Tasmin Lockwood, Melissa Repko, Jeff Cox, Sarah Min, Emily Wilkins, Mary Catherine Wellons and Samantha Subin contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.

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