On Monday, Anthropic announced the establishment of a company focused on the deployment of enterprise-level AI services, which will operate as a joint venture. The new company has Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs as founding partners, and is supported by a number of venture capital, hedge funds and private equity institutions, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Leonard Green and Sequoia Capital.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, the joint venture is valued at approximately US$1.5 billion, of which Anthropic, Blackstone, and Herman and Friedman each committed to investing US$300 million. This means that by combining large model manufacturers with traditional financial capital, Anthropic is trying to open a new channel for enterprise-level AI implementation by deeply binding asset management institutions.
Almost hours before Anthropic’s official announcement, its most direct competitor in the field of basic models, OpenAI, was revealed to be preparing a joint venture plan with a similar structure and a larger scale. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI plans to cooperate with a number of private equity institutions to establish a new company called "The Development Company", which will also focus on the deployment and implementation of enterprise-level AI solutions. The joint venture plans to raise US$4 billion from 19 investors, corresponding to a valuation of approximately US$10 billion. Disclosed investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital, and there is no obvious overlap with the Anthropic joint venture project on the investor list.
The two AI companies have intensively joined forces with asset management giants. The logic behind them is highly similar: by introducing funds from alternative asset management institutions and building special channels to expand enterprise-level AI business in a more radical way. This type of joint venture entity is expected to have priority access to a large number of portfolio companies held by investment institutions and gain an "entry advantage" on the sales side, while investors can obtain more direct and considerable value returns in subsequent AI project contracts.
The additional capital has also created conditions for the deep sinking of engineering resources, allowing the technical teams of the two companies to invest more manpower in individual enterprise projects and promote a "frontline deployment engineer" (FDE) model similar to what Palantir once vigorously promoted. For example, Anthropic said in the announcement that a cooperation may start with a team of engineers working with clinicians and IT personnel to jointly design tools around existing workflows, striving to make the new system naturally integrate into the daily usage scenarios of frontline employees; similar cooperation projects will cover medium-sized enterprises in various industries, and the people closest to the specific business will shape the project shape.
While these two joint venture plans are advancing, OpenAI and Anthropic themselves are also in a high-intensity financing cycle and are regarded by the market as potential IPO candidates. At the end of March this year, OpenAI announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$122 billion, corresponding to a valuation of approximately US$852 billion. According to previous reports by TechCrunch, Anthropic is also close to completing a new round of financing, planning to raise US$50 billion, corresponding to a valuation of approximately US$900 billion. In the context of large model manufacturers accelerating their sprint into the capital market, establishing a dedicated joint venture platform for the corporate market with Wall Street asset management institutions is becoming one of their new ways to strengthen their commercialization capabilities and consolidate their valuation foundation.
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