Anthropic forms $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman to deploy Claude across Wall Street

Blackstone and Goldman among backers for $1.5bn Anthropic JV

Anthropic has formed a $1.5bn joint venture with Wall Street groups including Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman to deploy its AI across their sprawling investment portfolios. A new consulting business will be funded with $300mn in initial investment from each of the three companies, while investment bank Goldman Sachs and private equity firm General Atlantic will commit $150mn apiece, according to two people briefed on the matter. The new company, which has yet to be named and is expected to be announced on Monday, aims to open commercial markets for Anthropic's powerful AI technologies. They include its Claude Code software tool, which has taken the business world by storm this year, causing a sell-off in many listed software companies and fuelling fears that AI will harm many privately held enterprise software businesses. The partnership comes as Anthropic seeks to generate new revenues that can help justify its heavy spending on data centre infrastructure, ahead of an expected public listing as soon as this year. The JV investors are among the largest owners of technology companies worldwide, with their diverse portfolios also spanning infrastructure, professional service and industrial companies where AI technology is expected to drive major efficiencies. Blackstone, the world's largest private firm, led much of the early talks around the venture and is considered a "founding partner" alongside Goldman and H&F. Co-founder and chief executive Stephen Schwarzman has been one of the foremost champions of AI on Wall Street, having committed hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to advance research and educational efforts into the technology. The firm is also the largest Wall Street investor in data centres, having committed $300bn of its own capital to the digital infrastructure needed to power AI algorithms. Many on Wall Street are fearful that AI technologies could present challenges to companies in their portfolios and are in a race to quickly adopt the technology as a way to create new business opportunities or cut costs. The JV is expected to keep its partners at the cutting edge of AI technologies while also producing an investment return, according to one person briefed on the talks, although it does not have a valuation beyond the collective $1.5bn in capital commitments. OpenAI, Anthropic's rival AI start-up, is also nearing a similar venture with Wall Street firms including TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield and Goanna Capital, the FT reported last month. Blackstone, General Atlantic, Goldman Sachs and H&F declined to comment. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic nears $1.5 billion AI joint venture with Wall Street firms, WSJ reports

May 3 (Reuters) - Anthropic is finalizing an about $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone (BX.N), opens new tab, Goldman Sachs (GS.N), opens new tab and a handful of other Wall Street firms to sell artificial-intelligence tools ⁠to private-equity-backed companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are anchoring the deal, and ⁠each company is expected to invest roughly $300 million, the report said, adding that ⁠Goldman Sachs is also set to be a founding investor, ⁠putting in around $150 million. Reuters could not immediately ⁠verify the report. Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Anthropic and Wall Street are building a $1.5bn pipeline into private equity

A joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and General Atlantic will sell Claude into the buyout firms' portfolio companies. OpenAI's DeployCo arrived first; this one is bigger. There is a kind of business school question that has been quietly answered over the past month, without anyone formally asking it. The question is: which is more valuable to a frontier-model company, the next $50bn cheque from a venture investor, or a permanent distribution channel into the operating companies of the world's largest private-equity firms? Anthropic has been working on the second answer. On Sunday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic was finalising an approximately $1.5bn joint venture with a small group of Wall Street firms, with an announcement expected as soon as Monday. A ccording to the WSJ, Anthropic, the buyout firm Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are anchoring the deal at roughly $300m apiece. Goldman Sachs joins as a founding investor at about $150m, with General Atlantic and other firms making up the rest. We wrote about the outline of this venture last month, when the structure was still scoped at $1bn or so; the final figure is closer to $1.5bn. The investors will create a vehicle that operates as something between a consulting arm and a deployment factory: helping the portfolio companies of its private-equity backers integrate Claude across their day-to-day operations. The pitch is straightforward. Buyout firms own thousands of operating businesses across health care, logistics, manufacturing, and financial services. Each is a potential Anthropic customer. Selling to them one by one, on the standard enterprise software cycle, would take years. Doing it inside a joint venture compresses that timeline into months. It is, in other words, less a product launch than a sales infrastructure project. The structural template will be familiar. OpenAI announced a similar joint venture, DeployCo, last month, anchored by TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield, and Goanna Capital. The five PE firms together committed about $4bn; OpenAI itself put in $500m, with an option for a further $1bn. The DeployCo vehicle is expected to be valued at $10bn in a round closing in early May, with OpenAI guaranteeing its PE backers an annualised return of 17.5 per cent over five years. Anthropic's structure is different in important ways. The total commitment is smaller in absolute dollars but more concentrated, with Anthropic itself contributing roughly the same amount as its biggest financial partner. There is no public reporting of guaranteed returns. The investor list is heavier on prestige and lighter on breadth: Blackstone is the largest alternative-asset manager in the world, Hellman & Friedman is among the most disciplined large-cap buyout houses, Goldman is Goldman, and General Atlantic gives the venture a growth-equity stake. Each side is, in effect, betting on a different proposition. OpenAI's DeployCo is a numbers play: pull as many PE portfolios as possible into a captive channel, fast. Anthropic's venture is a credibility play: anchor Claude inside a smaller number of high-profile financial firms whose imprimatur, in turn, sells the model to the rest of the market. The timing is not accidental. Anthropic has received pre-emptive offers for a roughly $50bn round at a valuation in the $850-900bn range, with the company's board expected to decide in May and an IPO targeted as early as October 2026. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate has, by its own disclosures, gone from approximately $9bn at the end of 2025 to around $30bn by the end of March 2026. A successful public listing at those numbers requires the company to demonstrate not only model capability but durable enterprise revenue at scale. A joint venture that pumps Claude into the portfolio companies of three or four major buyout firms creates exactly the kind of revenue ramp public-market investors prefer to model. It also has narrative value. Claude, in this telling, is not merely a chat product or a developer API but enterprise infrastructure, embedded inside the operating businesses that move significant chunks of the real economy. There is precedent for the strategy on Anthropic's books already. Goldman Sachs has spent the past several months piloting Claude internally as the basis for autonomous agents in accounting and compliance, with embedded Anthropic engineers reportedly spending six months inside the bank co-developing the systems. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman, separately, have been testing Anthropic's Mythos model under a Project Glasswing initiative focused on AI cyber-risk. The new joint venture is the commercialisation of those experiments. For the buyout firms, the calculation is similarly transparent. Private equity returns increasingly depend on operational improvements at portfolio companies rather than financial engineering at the holdco level. AI deployment, in theory, is the next great efficiency lever, and one that the largest funds have struggled to roll out consistently across diverse operating businesses. Owning a stake in the deployment vehicle for one of the two leading model companies is a hedge: it gives the firms first-mover access, preferred pricing, and, plausibly, a financial stake in Anthropic's broader commercial trajectory. Goldman Sachs's $150m position is smaller in dollar terms but particularly telling. It is the same bank rumoured to be co-leading Anthropic's eventual IPO. A $150m anchor in this venture is less an investment than a relationship deepening. Joint ventures of this kind have a chequered history in financial services. They tend to underperform the most optimistic projections, particularly when the deployed technology is changing as fast as foundation models. Claude as it exists today will not be Claude in three years; whether the venture's organisational structure can keep pace with model upgrades, pricing changes, and rival offerings is a real question. The DeployCo precedent is too young to assess, and Anthropic's vehicle is, by design, more selective in its partner roster, which limits how quickly it can absorb shocks. OpenAI's own valuation has come under scrutiny from its investors in recent weeks, a reminder that the model side of these arrangements is not above market discipline either. There is also a more philosophical risk. Anthropic was founded by researchers concerned about the safety of advanced AI, and has consistently positioned itself as the more cautious of the two leading commercial labs. A consulting arm that exists primarily to embed Claude inside the operating tissue of dozens of portfolio companies, each with its own data, regulatory, and labour profile, will test that positioning more rigorously than any external benchmark. None of these is fatal. They are simply the costs of a structure that, until last month, did not exist as a category. Anthropic has decided it would rather pay them with Wall Street co-investors than continue to compete with OpenAI through traditional enterprise sales. If the announcement lands as expected on Monday, that decision becomes its single largest commercial bet to date, larger, in distribution implications, than any of its model launches. Whether it works will be visible in revenue figures within a year, and in the IPO prospectus shortly after.

Anthropic Eyes $1.5 Billion Joint Venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs Amid AI Push Into Private Equity

The joint venture aims to market artificial intelligence (AI) tools to private equity-backed companies. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are expected to be the main investors, each contributing approximately $300 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. Goldman Sachs is also expected to be a founding investor, with a contribution of around $150 million, as per the report. Other firms, including General Atlantic, are part of the deal, bringing the total expected investment to about $1.5 billion. The investors aim to establish a company that will act as a consulting arm for Anthropic. This new entity will help businesses, including the private-equity firms' portfolio companies, integrate AI into their operations, WSJ reported. Anthropic, Hellman & Friedman, Blackstone, General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to Benzinga's requests for comment. Anthropic Faces Risks Amid Rapid Growth However, the company faced a setback when the Pentagon's tech chief declared Anthropic's Claude models a supply chain risk. This led to discussions about phasing out their usage over the months. Despite this, he stated, some "exceptions" could be granted based on integration complexities. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Anthropic Close to $1.5 Billion Deal With Wall Street Players | PYMNTS.com

An announcement of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street companies could come as soon as Monday (May 4), The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are leading the deal and are each expected to invest around $300 million, the sources added, with Goldman Sachs contributing $150 million. In all, the partners are expected to commit $1.5 billion, the sources said. According to the report, the investors want to launch a company that serves as a consulting service for Anthropic and helps businesses -- including the ones in private equity firms' portfolios -- embed AI into their operations. The WSJ also notes that OpenAI has been in discussions to start a similar effort as the two rival AI companies focus on selling their offerings to businesses. Anthropic has established itself as the dominant player in the enterprise market, the report added, with revenues surging recently due to the popularity of its coding tool. Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about the issues facing enterprise buyers as they try to incorporate AI into their operations. "Traditional software costs tracked headcount," that report said. "AI costs track activity. A single employee can generate thousands of AI interactions in a day. Another may trigger none. An automated process can run continuously without anyone watching the bill." As covered here, enterprise AI invoices have begun to resemble utility bills more than software subscriptions, with charges based on model activity, not employee count. "Finance teams built around stable annual renewals now manage a cost structure with no prior reference point," PYMNTS added. Costs can also compound further down. For every dollar spent on AI models, companies spend between $5 and $10 on integration, compliance and monitoring. Research from PYMNTS Intelligence shows that more than 8 in 10 CFOs at large companies are either using or considering using AI, with AI pricing models continuing to evolve as adoption of the technology scales. "The pricing pressure has a structural cause," PYMNTS added. "Building and running frontier AI models requires enormous amounts of computing infrastructure. That cost compounds as usage rises. Model makers are not yet profitable at scale and usage-based pricing is one mechanism for closing that gap as adoption grows."

Anthropic close to finalizing $1.5 bln AI venture with Wall St firms- WSJ By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Anthropic is close to finalizing a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and several other Wall Street firms to sell artificial intelligence tools to private-equity-backed companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are anchoring the deal, with each company expected to invest roughly $300 million, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Goldman Sachs is also set to be a founding investor, contributing around $150 million. The venture will focus on selling AI tools to companies backed by the private equity firms, and represents a major potential customer base for Anthropic. The AI start-up is racing to shore up its finances as reports show it preparing for a potential initial public offering this year. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Anthropic nears $1.5 billion AI joint venture with Wall Street firms, WSJ reports

May 3 (Reuters) - Anthropic is finalizing an about $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and a handful of other Wall Street firms to sell artificial-intelligence tools to private-equity-backed companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are anchoring the deal, and each company is expected to invest roughly $300 million, the report said, adding that Goldman Sachs is also set to be a founding investor, putting in around $150 million. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. (Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)