Anthropic and OpenAI expand enterprise AI push through new joint ventures

On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture centred on delivering enterprise AI services. Founding partners in the initiative include Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. The venture is further supported by a group of venture capital firms, hedge funds, and private equity investors, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green & Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the partnership, the venture has been valued at $1.5 billion. This figure includes $300 million commitments from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman.

The development comes as OpenAI prepares to pursue a comparable strategy. Just hours before Anthropic's announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is raising funds for a new venture called The Development Company, structured along similar lines. OpenAI's initiative is expected to operate on a larger scale, targeting $4 billion in funding from 19 investors at a $10 billion valuation. Reported investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent International, and Bain Capital, with no overlap between the investors in the two ventures.

Both initiatives follow a similar strategic approach: raising capital from alternative asset managers to establish new pathways for enterprise AI deployments. These ventures are expected to benefit from preferred access to their investors' portfolio companies, while those investors stand to capture additional value from the resulting enterprise contracts.

The infusion of capital is also intended to support increased engineering resources for individual deployments, consistent with the forward-deployed engineer model popularised by Palantir Technologies.

As Anthropic explained in its announcement, "An engagement might begin with the company's engineering team sitting down with clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit into the workflows that staff already use… Engagements like this will run across mid-sized companies across industries, each shaped by the people closest to the work."

These ventures come as both companies continue to raise capital rapidly while exploring potential initial public offerings. OpenAI disclosed $122 billion in new funding at the end of March, bringing its valuation to $852 billion. Meanwhile, reports indicate that Anthropic is nearing completion of its own funding round, seeking $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation.