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Artificial intelligence giants Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC are going after the enterprise in full force now, announcing the creation of new AI services companies in joint ventures with some of America’s biggest private equity firms.
Anthropic said today it is teaming up with Blackstone Inc., Hellman & Friedman LLC and The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to create a new enterprise AI services company that will bring its Claude AI capabilities hundred of midsized businesses. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s partners include Bain Capital LP, Advent International Corp., TPG Inc., Brookfield Corp. and Goanna Capital Management LLC, who are teaming up on a new venture called the Deployment Company, Bloomberg reported.
Anthropic’s new organization, which has not yet been named, will embed the company’s engineers within its customer’s teams. Its initial customer base will include the portfolio companies of its main backers, which also include Apollo Global Management Inc. and General Atlantic Service Co., LLC. According to the partners, the effort is designed to address a growing bottleneck in the AI industry, which is the lack of professional experts who have the skills to integrate the technology within real-world business operations.
Similarly, OpenAI will initially target the portfolio customers of its own partners, which also include Dragoneer Invesment Group LLC and SoftBank Group Corp. According to Bloomberg, its partners have access to more than 2,000 mid-sized companies and clients, which will give it a strong foundation from which it can drive broader enterprise AI adoption.
Goldman Sachs’ global head of asset and wealth management Marc Nachmann told CNBC that there’s a “big shortage” of people who actually know how to integrate AI with existing business processes.
Anthropic may have a slight advantage over OpenAI. The company has been at the forefront of enterprise AI adoption, targeting businesses with products such as Claude Code and Cowork. As of March, Anthropic had grown its annual revenue run rate to more than $30 billion, up from around $9 billion at the end of 2025.
It’s reportedly now mulling whether to go public before the end of the year, and is also said to be in talks with investors over another funding round before that happens, which could value it at more than $900 billion. By pairing its Claude technology with a network of investor-owned companies, Anthropic stands to further its lead in the enterprise middle markets.
The enterprise as a whole has become a major battleground for AI companies, with OpenAI also trying to up its game in the enterprise. Google LLC has also made a strong push in this direction with its Gemini Enterprise offering, which has been showing increased momentum in recent months.
OpenAI’s new venture is expected to be headed up by its Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. Last month, the company said he was shifting to a new role overseeing a push to sell the company’s software to enterprise firms, and will report directly to Chief Executive Sam Altman.
Nachmann told CNBC the new entity won’t act like a traditional consulting firm, but instead embed Anthropic’s engineers within its customer’s teams, so they can help them to redesign their workflows and integrate AI agents into core business processes. “Having the model alone doesn’t change your workflows or how you operate,” he explained. “You need people who can combine the technology with what’s actually happening in your business, and implement those changes.”
Regardless of how they dress it up, the two new joint ventures do look very much like consultancies, said Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller. Moreover, the fact both Anthropic and OpenAI have managed to secure billions of dollars in backing from a host of first-class investment banks and private equity firms, despite not having any experience in consulting, illustrates how desperate investors are to get in on the AI bonanza, he said.
“Anthropic and OpenAI look like they’re in a parade-style lockstep with the way they keep mirroring each other’s actions,” he continued. “It will be interesting to see how these consultancies will be set up, staffed and managed, and they may try to hire from companies like Accenture to fill some of those roles. But it’s also an acknowledgement that AI is becoming more like enterprise software, hence the need for the advice and services of consultants.”
The anchor partners – Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman – all plan to contribute $300 million to the venture, while Goldman Sachs will add an additional $150 million as a founding investor, bringing its total capital to $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI and its partners say they plan to inject as much as $10 billion into the Deployment Company. They’ll initially target their own portfolio companies, before trying to expand and target other midsized enterprises in areas such as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and retail.
“We think there’s a lot of value that this new entity can bring to companies to help transform them,” Nachmann added.
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Anthropic and OpenAI establish joint ventures on Wall Street to accelerate enterprise AI adoption – SiliconANGLE
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