Anthropic is in talks with Samsung Electronics about manufacturing a custom AI chip, according to The Information. The project is reportedly still in its early stages, with no detailed design yet. Anthropic is still working out what the chip would do and how powerful it needs to be. The company played down the effort, telling The Information that chips from AWS, Google, and Nvidia remain central to its strategy. It declined to comment on any chip roadmap of its own.

Still, signs point toward a chip being in the works. Anthropic has brought on chip engineers, including Clive Chan, an early member of both Tesla's and OpenAI's custom chip teams. He's expected to build out a dedicated chip group at Anthropic.

The move follows a broader trend. Whoever can build and run AI infrastructure more cheaply keeps more of the revenue. Custom chips are how you get there. OpenAI recently unveiled "Jalapeño," its first in-house inference chip, built with Broadcom. AWS, Google, and Meta all run custom silicon tuned for AI workloads.