AWS commits $1 billion to embed AI engineers with clients, and Anthropic launches a cheaper Claude

Amazon's cloud business, AWS, said on June 30 it will invest $1 billion in a new unit that places its AI engineers inside customer companies. Teams of about five or six engineers will work at a client for roughly 45 days at a time, alongside automated software tools. OpenAI and Anthropic set up similar services earlier this year.

Anthropic released a new AI system called Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30. The company said it can plan and carry out tasks in several steps on its own, work that until recently needed its most expensive models. Anthropic said Sonnet 5 costs about 40 percent less to run than its top model, Opus 4.8.

KFF, a health research group, released a poll on June 30 that tied frequent AI use to belief in vaccine myths. Adults who use AI chatbots at least weekly for health advice were more likely to say false vaccine claims were true. For example, 35 percent of weekly AI users said it is probably or definitely true that MMR vaccines cause autism. Among those who never use AI for health, 20 percent said the same.

EquiLibre Technologies, a Prague company founded by three former Google DeepMind researchers, was valued at $500 million after a new funding round. The size of the round was not disclosed. The three built an AI that beat professional poker players, and now use similar methods to trade US stocks with the firm Tower Research Capital.

Etched, a chip startup in San Jose, came out of hiding on June 30 and announced its first working chip. The company said it has raised $800 million and signed more than $1 billion in customer orders. The chip is built to run AI models faster and more cheaply, and Etched's latest funding round valued it at $5 billion.