Anthropic and OpenAI announced rival enterprise AI joint ventures on Monday within hours of each other, signalling a coordinated but competitive race to dominate corporate AI adoption ahead of anticipated initial public offerings (IPOs).
Anthropic announced a joint venture focused on deploying enterprise AI services, with Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs as founding partners, backed by a broader group of investors including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital. The venture is valued at $1.5 billion, anchored by $300 million commitments each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman and Friedman.
The new firm is a standalone entity with Anthropic engineering resources embedded directly within its team, a structure that mirrors Palantir’s forward-deployment model and puts Anthropic in direct competition with the world’s largest consulting firms for the lucrative business of corporate AI transformation.
Goldman Sachs’ Marc Nachmann said the venture would help democratise access to forward-deployed engineers for companies that currently cannot afford the talent or the consulting fees to build AI systems independently. Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray said the firm aims to break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption, namely the scarcity of engineers who can implement frontier AI systems at speed.
Hours before the Anthropic announcement, Bloomberg reported that rival OpenAI had raised more than $4 billion from investors including TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital for a firm focused on helping businesses leverage its AI software. OpenAI’s new venture is called The Deployment Company, valued at $10 billion excluding the newly raised funds, and will be majority owned and controlled by OpenAI. Other backers include SoftBank Group and Dragoneer Investment Group.
The overall logic of the two ventures is the same: raising money from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI deals. The ventures will presumably get preferred sales access to their investors’ portfolio companies, while the investors capture more value from any resulting contracts.
Partners for OpenAI’s new joint venture will get access to more than 2,000 portfolio companies and clients, with the aim of using those relationships to enable more businesses to adopt AI.
Both moves come as the two companies fundraise at a rapid pace. OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding at the end of March against a valuation of $852 billion, while Anthropic is in the final stages of its own funding round, seeking $50 billion in new funding against a $900 billion valuation.
