Anthropic and Wall Street giants prepare $1.5 billion project to sell AI to businesses
Investors in the project include Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, The Wall Street Journal has learned
Partnering with private equity funds will give Anthropic access to hundreds of non-public corporate clients / Photo: PhotoGranary02/Shutterstock.com
Anthropic, the developer of chatbot Claude and OpenAI's main competitor, is set to announce a joint venture (JV) with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street investment giants on Ma. 4, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing sources. The new JV will focus on selling Anthropic's AI solutions to portfolio businesses of private equity funds.
Details
Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are the anchor investors in the deal with total investment commitments of about $1.5 bln. Each of them will invest approximately $300 million in the JV. Anthropic itself will contribute the same amount. The co-founder investor will also be investment bank Goldman Sachs with a contribution of about $150 million. In addition, in the pool of participants announced General Atlantic, specializing in private equity (private equity), and a number of other fund managers, say interlocutors WSJ. In fact, the joint venture will become a consulting division of Anthropic, which will implement AI-based tools in the business processes of portfolio companies of private equity funds (PE-funds), the article says.
OpenAI is preparing a response
OpenAI is also in talks with PE funds - TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management - to create a similar joint venture. The structure with an estimated value of $10 billion will sell AI tools to the controlled businesses of these funds, Reuters reported in mid-March.
Why it's important.
Financial publications describe OpenAI and Anthropic's negotiations with PE funds not as a normal capital raising, but as a struggle for access to corporate clients. Such funds control the budgets of portfolio companies, which means they can help OpenAI and Anthropic strengthen their positions in the corporate market ahead of their IPOs, Reuters pointed out.
Axios wrote that PE funds and major AI companies have found themselves mutually interested in each other. Funds need to figure out how to use AI to improve the performance of portfolio assets and protect their business models from obsolescence. For OpenAI and Anthropic, these partnerships are a way to reach a broad pool of corporate clients without having to negotiate with each of them individually.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
