Two of the biggest names in AI just made the same power move on the same day.
Anthropic and OpenAI each announced new joint ventures aimed at bringing AI deeper into the business world.
The announcements are striking not just for their size, but for how closely they mirror each other.
Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion
On Monday, Anthropic officially announced a new joint venture focused on deploying AI services for large enterprises.
The founding partners are Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, three of the biggest names in finance and private equity.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal, pegging the venture’s valuation at $1.5 billion. Each of the three founding partners committed $300 million.
That’s $900 million right there, with the rest filled in by a roster of heavy hitters: Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital.
OpenAI’s Launch
Just hours before Anthropic made its announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was closing in on a similar deal.
Their new entity is called The Development Company. It raised $4 billion from 19 investors, and carries a valuation of $10 billion, nearly seven times the size of Anthropic’s venture.
OpenAI’s investor list includes TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital. Interestingly, there is no apparent overlap between OpenAI’s backers and Anthropic’s.
Motives
The logic is the same for both. These ventures create a new pipeline for enterprise AI deals.
Investors get preferred access to sell AI services to the companies they already own stakes in. In return, Anthropic and OpenAI gain fresh capital and new distribution channels.
It is a clever structure. The investors win twice, once if their portfolio companies adopt the technology, and again if the venture itself grows in value.
Both companies are also embracing a model made famous by Palantir: the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE.
Instead of handing a client software and walking away, teams of engineers embed themselves inside the client’s business.
They sit down with the people who actually do the work and build tools around existing processes.
Anthropic described it this way in its announcement: an engagement might start with engineers sitting alongside clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit the workflows those workers already use.
They envision this playing out across mid-sized companies in many different industries.
Forward-Deployed Engineer
A forward-deployed engineer goes on-site. They learn the actual workflows, the quirks, the workarounds.
Palantir has used this approach for years, especially with government and defense contracts.
Now Anthropic and OpenAI are bringing it to the enterprise AI market. For mid-sized companies that lack the resources to hire a full AI team, this could be a genuinely compelling offer.
Fundraising
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are currently raising capital at a dizzying pace. OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding at the end of March, at a valuation of $852 billion.
Anthropic is in the final stages of its own round, seeking $50 billion in new funding against a potential valuation of $900 billion.
These are numbers that were unthinkable for AI companies just a few years ago.
Both companies are also circling the possibility of going public eventually, though neither has committed to a timeline.
