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Anthropic, the company behind the Claude language models, is close to sealing a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and a group of Wall Street firms to market artificial intelligence tools to companies backed by private equity, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The deal also includes commitments from Hellman & Friedman and several other financial firms, and it amounts to one of the largest structured bets so far that enterprise AI can function as actual business infrastructure rather than a pilot project. It could be announced as early as Monday, the sources added.
Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are each putting up $300 million. Goldman Sachs is contributing around $150 million. The remaining portion of $1.5 billion comes from additional financial partners.
Anthropic recently closed a $30 billion funding round that valued it at $380 billion post-money, nearly double its prior Series F valuation of $183 billion. That capital base gives Anthropic the resources to staff a serious consulting operation while continuing to develop its underlying models.
OpenAI is also courting some of Wall Street’s biggest buyout firms to help sell its enterprise AI tools, with a $10 billion joint venture, internally referred to as “DeployCo,” in the works that would give TPG, Advent International and Bain Capital equity stakes in exchange for funneling OpenAI’s products across their portfolio companies.
The deal marks a sharp escalation in OpenAI’s enterprise push and cements private equity as a key battleground in the race to commercialize AI at scale.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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