Anthropic and OpenAI launch rival joint ventures to deploy AI models at scale for businesses

Anthropic and OpenAI are both launching joint ventures for enterprise AI services | TechCrunch

On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture focusing on deploying enterprise AI services. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs will be founding partners in the new venture, which is backed by a group of VCs, hedge funds, and private equity firms, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the partnership, reported the new venture was valued at $1.5 billion, which includes a $300 million commitment each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman. The announcement comes just as Anthropic's chief rival is preparing to make a similar move. Mere hours before the Anthropic announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was raising funds for a new venture called The Development Company, along very similar lines. OpenAI's venture would operate at a larger scale, raising $4 billion from 19 investors against a $10 billion valuation. Named investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital, with no apparent overlap in investment between the OpenAI venture and Anthropic's competitor. The overall logic of the two ventures is the same, raising money from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI deals. The ventures will presumably get preferred sales access to their investors' portfolio companies, while the investors will capture more value from any resulting contracts. The new capital will also allow more engineering resources to be devoted to each individual, embracing the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model popularized by Palantir. As Anthropic put it in its announcement: "An engagement might begin with the company's engineering team sitting down with clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit into the workflows that staff already use... Engagements like this will run across mid-sized companies across industries, each shaped by the people closest to the work." The new ventures come as both AI labs fundraise at a blistering pace, while circling possible IPOs. OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding at the end of March, against a valuation of $852 billion. TechCrunch reported last week that Anthropic is in the final stages of its own funding round, seeking $50 billion of new funding against a $900 billion valuation.

Anthropic comes for the midmarket software spend

Backed by private equity and banking giants, it will build custom AI systems for business bottlenecks There's gold in midmarket IT spend, and Anthropic - backed by private equity and banking heavyweights and tapping its Claude Partner Network - is coming for it. Anthropic and a group of investors are launching a standalone AI-native enterprise services firm for mid-sized companies to build custom Claude-powered systems for core business operations, with the new outfit set to join its Claude Partner Network. "Companies from community banks to mid-sized manufacturers and regional health systems stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources to build and run frontier deployments," Anthropic said in a press release. To give them the expertise, the AI model maker said its Applied AI engineers will work alongside the new firm's engineers to understand customers' operations, identify where Claude can help, and build custom systems. Anthropic did not reply to an email requesting comment. "There are some really strong reasons to focus on the midmarket," Shari Lava, IDC's group vice president of AI, data, and automation, told The Register. "First of all, there is just the sheer number of midmarket companies ... Second, midmarket companies tend to act more nimbly - they have to in order to compete effectively. They also tend to have more streamlined decision-making, greater cooperation in the executive ranks, and less risk aversion, all while often having less technical debt." Lava agreed with Anthropic that they also tend to lack the in-house skills to tackle large AI projects, and they don't get much attention from large, enterprise-focused vendors, meaning they are a greenfield for Anthropic. "While most work with multiple hyperscalers and SaaS companies, most of the projects have little support from the vendor directly, meaning partners are key to any deal," she told The Register. "Midmarket offers faster sales cycles and higher willingness to pay for custom integration than fragmented SMBs, while being less locked into big vendor ecosystems than enterprises." Gary McConnell, CEO of VirtuIT, a national solution provider that is focused on midmarket customers, said Anthropic is presenting partners with a "huge opportunity" to win services business by addressing the under-adoption of AI among those customers in that middle tier. "Ultimately, I think it's a huge opportunity," he said. "The idea of that is not to do more with less, it's to do more with more. So when you see these models get plugged in and they're able to generate more data, and that data being generated needs to be backed up, and the backup pools grow, and the storage grows, and it needs to sit on either a local or cloud compute. There are just so many consultative elements that the opportunity of AI brings to the equation." McConnell said VirtuIT is exploring partnership deals with several AI companies, including Anthropic. He said the largest pool of customers for Anthropic's services is likely going to come from its financial backers. To fund the standalone services company, Anthropic has partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. McConnell sees this as a way for Anthropic to quickly get early wins under its belt. "They have the portfolio companies that fall under these large conglomerates that generate sales pipeline for them," he said. "If you're a portfolio company owned by Goldman Sachs, you will not be running on OpenAI's platform. It's as simple as that." Anthropic's willingness to build bespoke software for customers seems to fuel the SaaS-pocalypse narrative that has developed around AI tools' displacement of large legacy IT platforms. While Lava said this deal could push around some small to mid-size SaaS vendors if it is well executed, it may complement the larger SaaS providers by introducing agentic workflows to the midmarket. "I think it could put pressure on SaaS players, and even other legacy applications outside of cloud. Especially for app providers outside of core enterprise apps like ERP or CRM in the short term," she said. "It's risky to move core apps, but there are many other applications in mid-size companies, many of which a company starts to outgrow quickly in midmarket, such as expense apps, PM tools, marketing apps, etc." McConnell said there is an appetite inside the midmarket for novel approaches to software management that Anthropic can exploit. "I think over time, they're going to be able to continue to show business value for organizations and say, 'Hey, you don't need this legacy CRM, that hasn't been touched in the manufacturing industry in 30 years. We can build this for you pretty cheaply, with tools you're already using,'" McConnell said. ®

OpenAI, Anthropic ventures in talks to buy AI services firms, sources say

NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - The joint ventures OpenAI and Anthropic separately created with private equity firms are in talks to acquire services companies that help businesses deploy artificial intelligence, with OpenAI's new venture in advanced stages on three deals, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The AI companies are looking to incorporate hundreds of engineers and consultants to help companies put their AI models to work, five of the people said. The acquisitions would mark a new front in the competition for AI market share between the companies. While both have largely focused on building ⁠more powerful AI models, deploying them at scale requires a different kind of expertise -- one they are now looking to buy. OpenAI is raising roughly $4 billion from 19 investors, including TPG, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management, for its joint venture, Reuters previously reported. The vehicle, called The Deployment Company, will be announced later this week, one of the people said. Anthropic is making a similar push by raising $1.5 billion from investors including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Journal reported. Most of the capital raised through the joint ventures is expected to fund acquisitions of engineering services and consulting firms, the people said, asking not to be named as the information is private. OpenAI and ⁠Anthropic declined to comment. NEED FOR SKILLED, LABOR-INTENSIVE SERVICES The move reflects a tension at the heart of the enterprise AI industry: what is often cast as a high-margin software business that could eliminate the need for consultants still depends on labor-intensive, highly skilled services. That is because companies need engineers and consultants to tailor AI models to their specific data, systems and workflows, and ⁠to adapt the software as business needs change. Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer of Blackstone, said in a statement that hiring highly skilled workers will "break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption." The approach mirrors Palantir's (PLTR.O), opens new tab model of embedding ⁠engineers inside customers' operations to implement and adapt their software -- a playbook the AI industry is now replicating at scale. It also suggests OpenAI and Anthropic could consolidate a fragmented market of smaller consulting and IT services firms ⁠as they build dedicated deployment arms. "We believe it can help break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption by expanding the number of highly skilled implementation partners," Gray said of Anthropic's joint venture. Reporting by Milana Vinn in New York; Writing by Sabrina Valle; Editing by Echo Wang, Rod Nickel Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence * Mergers & Acquisitions * Capital Markets Milana Vinn Thomson Reuters Milana Vinn reports on technology, media, and telecom (TMT) mergers and acquisitions. Her content usually appears in the markets and deals sections of the website. Milana previously worked at GLG and PE Hub, where she spent several years covering TMT deals in private equity. She graduated from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism with Masters in Business Journalism.

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 teams with Goldman, Blackstone and others on $1.5 billion AI venture targeting PE-owned firms

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron during the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026. Anthropic said Monday it is partnering with private equity giants Goldman Sachs and Blackstone to launch a $1.5 billion firm aimed at speeding the adoption of artificial intelligence across hundreds of companies. The new entity, formed alongside the San Francisco-based PE firm Hellman & Friedman and backed by a group of asset managers including Apollo and General Atlantic, will deploy Anthropic's Claude AI model directly inside businesses, starting with companies owned by the investment firms. Executives say the effort is designed to tackle a growing bottleneck in the AI boom: a shortage of experts capable of implementing the technology inside real-world operations. "There's a big shortage of people who know how to apply these tools into businesses and then transform them," Marc Nachmann, Goldman's global head of asset and wealth management, told CNBC in an interview. The move marks Anthropic's latest effort to deepen its lead in the market for enterprise AI as competition intensifies with rivals including OpenAI. By pairing the latest Claude models with a built-in network of investor-owned companies, Anthropic is positioning itself to gain an edge in middle-market adoption of the technology. It's a key battleground as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for massive IPOs as early as this year. Rather than acting as a traditional consulting firm, the venture -- which hasn't yet been named -- will embed engineers inside companies to redesign workflows and integrate AI into core processes, Nachmann said. "Having the model alone doesn't change your workflows or how you operate," he said. "You need people who can combine the technology with what's actually happening in the business and implement those changes." The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the $1.5 billion commitment of the firms involved. Goldman and its partners expect to use their own portfolio companies as an initial proving ground for the new platform before targeting other mid-sized companies, especially in the PE-owned universe of healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail and real estate sectors. "We think there's a lot of value that this new entity can bring to companies to help transform them," Nachmann said. "Obviously, we're going to use it a lot at our portfolio companies."

Anthropic and Wall Street Giants Join Forces to Create New A.I. Firm

Blackstone and Goldman Sachs are among the investors in the new firm, which will help integrate Anthropic's A.I. model Claude into their systems. Anthropic is teaming up with several large investment firms to create a venture that will help companies integrate artificial intelligence tools into their systems, the latest example of the deepening ties between Wall Street and the A.I. industry. The private equity firms Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman and the investment bank Goldman Sachs through its investment funds are among the financial backers in the new firm, which will work with companies to deploy Anthropic's A.I. model Claude. In announcing the creation of the firm on Monday, Anthropic and the investment firms said the technology around A.I. was changing so rapidly that many companies were finding it challenging to integrate Claude. The backers of the new firm said it would work with Anthropic's engineers to help companies deploy Claude, which has abilities that "change on a monthly or even weekly basis." The creation of a firm combining Wall Street and Anthropic comes as the A.I. industry is locked in a fierce competition to become the go-to A.I. model in the private and public sector. It is also happening as A.I. companies, including Anthropic and its rival OpenAI, are expected to soon go public in what could be the largest series of public stock offerings ever, creating a boon for Wall Street. The decision by Blackstone, Goldman and the other investment firms to partner with Anthropic is a notable endorsement of an A.I. company that the Trump administration has criticized for refusing to allow the Pentagon to deploy its models without meeting the company's ethical limits. Anthropic and the Pentagon are in federal litigation over the Defense Department's decision to label the company a supply chain risk, an unusual use of the government's power to raise concerns about how corporations build their products. Many of the details of Anthropic's venture with Wall Street have not yet been announced, including its name and chief executive. But one area that the venture said it would start working on is integrating Claude at portfolio companies of the private equity firms that backed this deal, including Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman said they would each put $300 million into the new company, and Goldman Sachs would contribute roughly $150 million, according to two people familiar with the deal terms. General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital, are among the other firms that are taking part and investing in the venture Wall Street banks have been among A.I.'s enthusiastic corporate users. During the first quarter earnings reports from the largest banks, some executives discussed with unusual candor how A.I. had automated certain jobs, which in turn led to job cuts and higher profits. Elon Musk recently demanded that banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers working on the I.P.O. of his company, SpaceX, to buy subscriptions to his A.I. chatbot, Grok.

Anthropic unleashes finance agents for Claude

If you've ever read Anthropic's disclaimer that responses generated by Claude may contain mistakes and thought, "That's what I need to spice up financial operations," you're in luck. Anthropic has released a set of financial agent templates designed to allow its Claude AI service to better assist with financial tasks. "Each agent template is a reference architecture that packages three things: skills (instructions and domain knowledge for the task), connectors (governed access to the data the task runs on), and subagents (additional Claude models that are called upon by the main agent, for specific sub-tasks such as comparables selection or methodology checks)," the company explains. The terminology can be a bit murky because, at the end of the day, it's all just a model pursuing a goal in an iterative loop with resources like tools and data. Claude Code itself is an agentic harness that supports an underlying model using Anthropic's defined control flow. When the Claude model is driving the control flow toward a goal - deciding what tools to use and what data to access - that's an agent. Then there are subagents, and these are really just API calls to Claude using specialized system prompts, specified tools, and context provided by an orchestration system. They're a bit like functions in a program that handle a particular aspect of an application. So Anthropic's finance agents consist of: skills, which are markdown files that describe workflows; connectors, which are integrations with external services; and subagents, made up of a focused system prompt, specific tools, and contextual data. For example, Anthropic's Know-Your-Customer Screener agent template (kyc-screener) includes a skill called kyc-rules that spells out how Claude should apply a firm's KYC/AML (anti-money laundering) rules to a parsed onboarding record. The rules tell the AI model to assign a risk rating, check documents, cite rule outcomes, and produce a result formatted thus: This JSON data would presumably be useful to whatever corporate system receives it. Anthropic's list of agents includes: Pitch builder; Meeting preparer; Earnings reviewer; Model builder; Market researcher; Valuation reviewer; General ledger reconciler; Month-end closer; Statement auditor; and, as previously noted, KYC screener. These can be applied to Claude Cowork and Claude Code as plugins or as a "cookbook" - copyable code snippets - for Claude Managed Agents. You may be thinking that finance tends to be fairly unforgiving when it comes to sciency stuff like numbers. Perhaps you're unimpressed that Anthropic's Opus 4.7 model scored an "industry leading" 64.37 percent on Vals AI's Finance Agent benchmark - a failure rate that would get a human tossed. Worry not, because Anthropic expects that users will "stay firmly in the loop - reviewing, iterating on, and approving Claude's work before it goes to a client, gets filed, or is acted on."

The day after the $1.5bn JV, Anthropic shipped what the JV will sell

Tuesday's New York event added Claude Opus 4.7, a library of ~10 pre-built finance agents, an FIS-built AML investigator going live at BMO and Amalgamated Bank, and a Moody's native app covering 600 million companies. The day after the $1.5bn Wall Street joint venture, the product side caught up. On Monday, Anthropic announced a $1.5bn enterprise services joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, as one the most concentrated Wall-Street-led AI services bet to date. On Tuesday morning, the product side caught up. Anthropic has unveiled a suite of pre-built AI agents specifically designed for the most labour-intensive workflows in financial services, alongside a new model release, a deep partnership with Moody's, and full Microsoft 365 integration. The two announcements, taken together, mark Anthropic's transition from frontier-model lab to financial-services platform. Both pieces were necessary. The joint venture provides distribution. The product release provides what is being distributed. The centre of Tuesday's announcement, made at Anthropic's invite-only "Briefing: Financial Services" event in New York, was Claude Opus 4.7, the company's most capable model release yet for finance-specific workloads. Sitting on top of it is a library of roughly ten pre-built agents covering the workflows that consume the most analyst hours in banking and asset management: pitchbooks and earnings analysis, credit memos, underwriting, KYC, month-end close, statement audits, and insurance claims, among others. Each ships as a reference architecture, complete with the skills, connectors, and sub-agents needed to run the workflow end-to-end. Crucially, the agents are not generic. They are pre-wired into the data sources finance teams actually use. Moody's is embedding its full platform inside Claude as a native app, allowing users to pull credit ratings, risk data, and ownership-structure analysis on more than 600 million companies without leaving the Claude interface. Verisk, Third Bridge, Fiscal AI, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, GLG, Guidepoint, and IBISWorld have joined an existing data-partner roster that already included LSEG, S&P Capital IQ, Morningstar, and PitchBook. That is, in functional terms, much of the addressable equity-research and credit-analysis data universe. The third piece is the FIS partnership. FIS, the publicly listed banking-technology giant, announced on Monday that it has built a Financial Crimes AI Agent on Claude, designed to compress anti-money-laundering investigations from hours or days into minutes. BMO and Amalgamated Bank are the first announced deployments; broader availability is planned for the second half of 2026. Anthropic has shipped financial-services tools before. Earlier rollouts of Claude for Financial Services centred on plug-ins that let analysts query financial data inside the Claude chat experience, and TNW covered the Xero partnership in March in which Claude began surfacing small-business accounting data inside its chat interface. Tuesday's announcement is structurally different. It moves Claude from a tool an analyst opens when they want to ask a question to a system that runs predefined workflows autonomously, with audit trails, regulatory traceability, and embedded governance. Claude Managed Agents, the underlying platform Anthropic launched in April, absorbed the technical complexity of deploying autonomous agents by moving orchestration logic to Anthropic's model rather than to customer-side engineering teams. The financial-services suite is the first vertical-specific implementation of that platform at scale. The agent does the orchestration; the bank provides the data and the governance; Anthropic, in effect, provides the operating system. The FIS Financial Crimes AI Agent matters more than the others on the list because it addresses a regulatory category, AML, where the labour costs of compliance have grown faster than almost any other line in bank operating budgets. According to FIS, the global financial-crimes problem is roughly $40bn annually in fines, investigations, and false-positive review costs. Compressing AML investigation times from hours to minutes, if it works at scale, is a meaningful number for any large bank's chief compliance officer. BMO is one of the named launch deployments; we wrote about BMO's broader AI and quantum strategy, and the bank's willingness to be the visible early adopter of a Claude-based AML agent is consistent with its public posture as one of the more deliberate AI-adopting Canadian institutions. The structure of the deal also shows the model. The agent was built jointly: FIS provided the financial-data infrastructure, regulatory connectors, and bank-system integration; Anthropic provided Claude reasoning, agent orchestration, and the embedded engineering team. Anthropic is, on Tuesday's evidence, attacking what it perceives as the highest-margin opportunity in enterprise AI. Financial services is the single largest professional-services line in the global economy, with consulting, audit, and advisory revenues at the major firms running into the tens of billions per category. Taken together, with Tuesday's launch as the consolidating event, the pattern looks more like Anthropic systematically dismantling the pricing model of the industry it is selling into. There is, in 2026, a small but visible pattern of frontier-AI operators competing to embed themselves directly inside the workflows of finance and banking. OpenAI's Deployment Company, finalised on Monday at $10bn, will operate the same play through private-equity portfolio companies. Google's $40bn investment in Anthropic announced earlier this year makes the company a Google-Cloud-friendly counterweight to OpenAI inside enterprise distribution. Anthropic's annualised revenue, by recent reporting, has reached roughly $30bn, up from $1bn in January 2025, growth that, if accurate, has no precedent in American technology history. The financial-services suite is, in revenue terms, the most directly monetisable category in that growth. There are real ones. The first is governance. Banks operate inside regulatory regimes that, by design, treat autonomous decision-making with caution. The US Treasury chief publicly urged bank executives to approach Anthropic's recent AI releases with caution in late April, in a remark widely reproduced through the trade press. The signal was unmistakable: regulators are watching the pace at which agentic AI is being deployed inside critical financial infrastructure, and they are not yet certain that the controls match the capability. The second is concentration. Anthropic now sits in an unusual structural position: simultaneously the model behind Project Glasswing's offensive-cybersecurity preview (Mythos), the platform JPMorgan and Goldman are testing for cyber defence, the chatbot Xero, Intuit, and Moody's are embedding in their products, the architecture FIS is using to ship AML agents to BMO, and the technology layer the new Anthropic-Blackstone-Hellman & Friedman-Goldman venture is built around. That is a lot of dependency on a single company, deployed across a financial system that has spent decades building redundancy. The risk is not that Anthropic will fail. It is that, if it ever did, the cascade across the customer base would be unusually large. The third is competitive durability. Anthropic launched a marketplace for Claude-powered enterprise software in April, and the financial-services agent suite is the most aggressive use of that distribution to date. But agent technology, like model technology, is not exclusive to Anthropic. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are all shipping competitive agent platforms. The question is whether Anthropic's go-deep-on-finance bet, with the Moody's native app, the FIS partnership, the data-partner expansion, and the joint venture, builds the kind of switching costs that protect the customer base over time, or whether the underlying compute layer remains a commodity that customers can swap out when a cheaper alternative emerges. Tuesday's launch is, in some ways, the cleanest expression yet of Anthropic's commercial thesis. The argument is that frontier-model capability, on its own, is not the product. The product is what happens when that capability is wired into the data systems, regulatory connectors, and operational workflows of the industries with the largest professional-services budgets. Financial services is the test case. Agents that close the books at month-end, draft credit memos, run KYC, and police AML at scale are the artefacts of that test. If the agents work, the productivity gain inside finance teams is hard to overstate. If they do not, the cost of having shipped them at this scale, before the regulatory and reliability frameworks have caught up, will be paid by Anthropic and by every bank that took the early adoption call. The order of arrival, joint venture announced Monday, agents shipped Tuesday, suggests Anthropic has decided that the speed of execution outweighs the risk of imperfect early deployments. The customers it has named, BMO, Amalgamated Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan in the parallel Glasswing programme, have signalled they agree. By the end of 2026, the answer will be visible in two metrics that the industry has been watching for months: how much of Anthropic's roughly $30bn revenue run rate is now demonstrably in finance verticals, and how much of the customer-side cost reduction the agents claimed actually shows up in bank operating expenses. Both are quarterly questions. Both will be asked, in earnings calls and analyst notes, throughout the rest of the year.

Anthropic deepens finance push with 10 new AI agents for banks, insurers

NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - Artificial-intelligence lab Anthropic is diving deeper into the financial services industry, releasing software on Tuesday that can speed up myriad tasks for banks, insurers and other companies. Timed to an event Anthropic is hosting in New York, the startup launched 10 financially focused agents, or AI programs that carry out tasks with limited human intervention. These include agents that can build a pitchbook, ⁠audit statements or draft credit memos, Anthropic said. The company also announced more data sources that its so-called Claude AI can access to perform financial work. Not yet a year into unveiling ambitions to tailor AI for finance, Anthropic has rapidly expanded its business, with adoption by Goldman Sachs (GS.N), opens new tab, Visa (V.N), opens new tab, Citi (C.N), opens new tab, AIG (AIG.N), opens new tab and others. Banks have scrambled to access its Claude Mythos model to shore up their cybersecurity. At the Tuesday event, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was due to appear on stage with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N), opens new tab. Anthropic's drive to automate enterprise work has meanwhile ⁠hammered an array of financial, legal and software stocks, due to anticipation that the AI provider would disrupt or supplant their businesses. The San Francisco-based AI lab has said it wants to improve outcomes for customers, rather than replace them. In an interview, Nicholas Lin, who leads Anthropic's financial services product work, said an ⁠increasingly capable Claude would develop "vertical-specific intelligence," for instance in finance, even as the startup's AI is widely applicable across industries. These AI model advances, coupled with hands-on customer support and key office software integrations, were underpinning ⁠a rapid uptick in Anthropic's financial services business, said Lin. "I've honestly seen a dramatic change, especially in the past six months," Lin said. As part of the announcement, Anthropic said the ⁠10 new AI agents could plug in to its Claude Code and Cowork products out of the box, and could be customized to a firm's policies and style. Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Kenneth Li in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis 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 deepens its ties to Wall Street with new partnerships, tools

Why it matters: Anthropic is working to cement itself as Wall Street's go-to AI lab. Driving the news: The new Claude agents will target common financial work, like building pitchbooks and models or reviewing audits and valuations. * Claude will be available across the Microsoft 365 suite and agents will carry memories, or context about you, across different apps (so if you change a model in Excel, that will be reflected in a PowerPoint deck, for example). * Anthropic is also expanding data partnerships with firms ranging from Dun & Bradstreet to Moody's to Third Bridge. * Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon are sharing more about the expanded partnerships in a fireside chat in New York City Tuesday. What they're saying: "We want to reduce the deployment cycle from months to days," Nicholas Lin, Anthropic's head of product for financial services, tells Axios. * The expansion of Anthropic's financial services is separate from its push to target private equity firms via a joint venture, both share the goal of increasing adoption and speeding it up. Threat level: Anthropic is the dominant AI provider on Wall Street, but competitor OpenAI launched a new suite of tools focusing on financial use cases alongside its latest model release, GPT 5.5. * Anthropic launched a financial interface in July 2025, among its first big industry disruptions, laying the groundwork for a broader focus on enterprise AI adoption. * Claude's models are the best performing for financial tasks according to Vals AI, an independent evaluation benchmark. The bottom line: Anthropic is deepening its ties to Wall Street before it is expected to go public this fall.

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 deepens push into Wall Street with new AI agents, full Microsoft 365 integration, Moody's data partnership | Fortune

Anthropic is dramatically expanding its footprint in financial services, launching a suite of pre-built AI agents for the world's largest banks and debuting Claude Opus 4.7 -- its most capable model for financial work yet. The announcements, made Tuesday at the company's invite-only event in New York, cap a 48-hour blitz that signals Anthropic isn't just selling AI software to banks. It's building the infrastructure, the deployment mechanism, and relationships in the financial industry to become the operating layer for Wall Street. The strategy has two tracks: one aimed at the largest institutions, giving them tools to configure and run AI agents themselves; the other aimed at the mid-market, using a new private equity-backed joint venture to embed Claude directly into company operations. Together, they represent perhaps the most aggressive push yet by any AI company to capture financial services end-to-end. The era of consumer-app land grabs is giving way to something more durable for frontier AI labs: enterprise revenue. For both OpenAI and Anthropic, winning paying clients across industries -- banks, law firms, software companies, healthcare systems, government agencies -- has become the load-bearing pillar of the business model. Enterprise contracts offer what consumer subscriptions cannot: high-margin, multi-year commitments; deep integration into mission-critical workflows that make switching costs real; and usage volumes that justify the staggering capital expenditures these labs are pouring into compute. Anthropic in particular has leaned hard into this positioning, building Claude's reputation around reliability, safety, and coding performance -- qualities that matter far more to a Fortune 500 CIO than to a casual user. Just one day before Tuesday's product announcement, Anthropic unveiled a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to create a new AI-native enterprise services firm -- essentially a forward-deployed engineering operation that puts Claude at the core of how mid-sized companies actually run. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each contributing roughly $300 million, with Goldman Sachs at $150 million; Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, Leonard Green, GIC, and Sequoia Capital also participated. (The Wall Street Journal reported on the $1.5 billion figure, which Anthropic has not confirmed.) "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in announcing the joint venture. The vehicle gives Anthropic a direct pipeline into the portfolios of some of the world's largest PE firms -- a distribution channel no software vendor has previously had at this scale. Tuesday's product announcement filled in what that joint venture will actually be deploying -- a set of purpose-built financial services agents now available on top of Claude Opus 4.7. The announcement, made Tuesday at the company's invite-only "Briefing: Financial Services" event in New York, came alongside the first-ever shared stage appearance of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and JPMorganChase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon. The two discussed what AI means for markets, the workforce, and the global economy. Tuesday's product launch filled in what the joint venture will actually be deploying. At the core is a library of roughly 10 pre-built AI agents designed for the most labor-intensive workflows in finance: pitchbooks and earnings analysis, credit memos, underwriting, KYC, month-end close, statement audits, and insurance claims. Each agent ships as a reference architecture -- complete with the skills, connectors, and subagents needed to run that workflow out of the box. Firms can then adapt them to their own modeling conventions, risk policies, and internal approval chains. Once configured, an agent can run as a plugin within Claude's Cowork and Claude Code environments alongside human analysts, or as a Claude Managed Agent, in which Anthropic handles the secure production infrastructure. Anthropic is also rolling out full Microsoft 365 integration, enabling Claude to function as a single agent across Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook -- carrying context across all four applications simultaneously. Add-ins for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word became generally available today. The integration is a significant move for financial services firms, where analysts spend a large portion of their day toggling between spreadsheets, slide decks, and email. The announcement also includes new connectors to data sources already embedded in financial workflows. Verisk, Third Bridge, Fiscal AI, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, GLG, Guidepoint, and IBISWorld all join an existing roster that includes LSEG, S&P Capital IQ, Morningstar, and PitchBook. The marquee data partnership: Moody's is embedding its full platform into Claude as a native app, enabling users to analyze credit ratings and risk data for more than 600 million companies without leaving the Claude interface. Underpinning all of it is Claude Opus 4.7, which Anthropic says now leads Vals AI's Finance Agent benchmark with a score of 64.4% and tops the GDPval-AA evaluation for economically valuable knowledge work. Since first launching Claude for Financial Services in July 2025 and expanding the platform later that year, Anthropic has placed Claude into production at JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, Citi, AIG, Visa, and others. Tuesday's event also featured an onstage panel with Peter Zaffino, CEO of AIG; Marco Argenti, CIO of Goldman Sachs; and Lori Beer, CIO of JPMorganChase, discussing their institutions' AI journeys.

Why private equity is making deals with the AI giants

Anthropic announced its joint venture yesterday, while OpenAI's announcement is expected later this month. Zoom in: The two new entities are structured quite differently, according to multiple sources: * Anthropic: Its entity is seeded with $1.5 billion, which also serves as the new entity's de facto valuation. Anthropic is a minority shareholder, on par with lead investors like Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. * Other backers include Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo, GIC and Sequoia Capital. * OpenAI: Its entity is seeded with $4 billion at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. Backers are allowed to exit after five years with a 17.5% gain guaranteed by OpenAI, but their upside is capped at a level I've not yet learned. * Its investor roster includes around 20 firms. This includes Bain Capital and TPG, but not all of them are traditional private equity. OpenAI is investing around $500 million. * It also may acquire forward-deployed engineering teams. Behind the scenes: Shareholders in each entity are said to be precluded from investing in the other, although it sounds like Goldman Sachs may be in both. * Apparently that's the benefit of being a bank both Anthropic and OpenAI want to help manage their IPO. The bottom line: Private equity views these deals as both offensive and defensive.

Anthropic, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs to create AI services company

Anthropic has partnered with investment giants, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to form a new AI services company. As Anthropic continues to push into the enterprise market with its AI models - it already has major partnerships with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte and PwC - this new partnership aims to reach mid-size companies that are clients of the three investment giants, and beyond. The new company will be a standalone entity with Anthropic engineering and partnership resources embedded directly within its team. It aims to serve as "an accelerant" in bringing AI solutions to mid-size companies. It will initially work to drive adoption across a customer base of the investment firms' portfolio companies, and subsequently be made available to independent companies. Applied AI engineers from Anthropic will work alongside the firm's engineering team to identify where Claude can have the most impact, Anthropic said, and then help build custom solutions "to support customers over the long term". As well as the four founding partners, the new independent entity is backed by a consortium of alternative asset managers that include General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC, and Sequoia Capital. According to Anthropic, mid-size organisations like community banks to mid-sized manufacturers and regional health systems stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources to build and run frontier deployments - something the new player aims to tackle. "This is a rare convergence: massive market need, the unmatched AI technical capability of Anthropic, and a consortium of investors with the reach to scale fast," said Patrick Healy, CEO at Hellman & Friedman. "The near-term value to our portfolio companies is substantial, and we are excited by the long-term potential to build the definitive enterprise AI services platform." "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," said Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic. "Our partnerships with the world's leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises. This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers." "We intend to build a scaled, world-class company to deploy Anthropic's incredible technology across a range of businesses in our portfolio and beyond," said Jon Gray, president and COO of Blackstone. "We believe it can help break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption by expanding the number of highly skilled implementation partners." "This is a compelling investment opportunity for our clients and will enable mid-market companies to deploy Anthropic's AI solutions to drive meaningful impact in their business," said Marc Nachmann, global head of Asset and Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs. "By democratising access to forward-deployed engineers, the new company can help the expansive network of portfolio companies in our Asset Management business and other companies of similar sizes accelerate AI adoption to grow and scale their operations." Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager with over $1.3trn in assets under management. Hellman & Friedman is a major global private equity firm with $115bn billion in assets under management. Goldman Sachs is one of the leading investors in alternatives globally, with over $625bn in assets. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Anthropic and OpenAI establish joint ventures on Wall Street to accelerate enterprise AI adoption - SiliconANGLE

Anthropic and OpenAI establish joint ventures on Wall Street to accelerate enterprise AI adoption Artificial intelligence giants Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC are going after the enterprise, announcing the creation of new AI services companies in joint ventures with some of America's biggest private equity firms. Anthropic said today it is teaming up with Blackstone Inc., Hellman & Friedman LLC and The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to create a new enterprise AI services company that will bring its Claude AI capabilities hundred of mid-sized businesses. Meanwhile, OpenAI's partners include Bain Capital LP, Advent International Corp., TPG Inc., Brookfield Corp. and Goanna Capital Management LLC, who are teaming up on a new venture called the Deployment Company, Bloomberg reported. Anthropic's new organization, which has not yet been named, will embed the company's engineers within its customer's teams. Its initial customer base will include the portfolio companies of its main backers, which also include Apollo Global Management Inc. and General Atlantic Service Co., LLC. According to the partners, the effort is designed to address a growing bottleneck in the AI industry, which is the lack of professional experts who have the skills to integrate the technology within real-world business operations. Similarly, OpenAI will initially target the portfolio customers of its own partners, which also include Dragoneer Invesment Group LLC and SoftBank Group Corp. According to Bloomberg, its partners have access to more than 2,000 mid-sized companies and clients, which will give it a strong foundation from which it can drive broader enterprise AI adoption. Goldman Sachs' global head of asset and wealth management Marc Nachmann told CNBC that there's a "big shortage" of people who actually know how to integrate AI with existing business processes. Anthropic may have a slight advantage over OpenAI. The company has been at the forefront of enterprise AI adoption, targeting businesses with products such as Claude Code and Cowork. As of March, Anthropic had grown its annual revenue run rate to more than $30 billion, up from around $9 billion at the end of 2025. It's reportedly now mulling whether or not to go public before the end of the year, and is also said to be in talks with investors over another funding round before that happens, which could value it at over $900 billion. By pairing its Claude technology with a network of investor-owned companies, Anthropic stands to further its lead in the enterprise middle markets. The enterprise as a whole has become a major battleground for AI companies, with OpenAI also trying to up its game in the enterprise. Google LLC has also made a strong push in this direction with its Gemini Enterprise offering, which has been showing increased momentum in recent months. OpenAI's new venture is expected to be headed up by its Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. Last month, the company said he was shifting to a new role overseeing a push to sell the company's software to enterprise firms, and will report directly to Chief Executive Sam Altman. Nachmann told CNBC the new entity won't act like a traditional consulting firm, but instead embed Anthropic's engineers within its customer's teams, so they can help them to redesign their workflows and integrate AI agents into core business processes. "Having the model alone doesn't change your workflows or how you operate," he explained. "You need people who can combine the technology with what's actually happening in your business, and implement those changes." The anchor partners - Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman - all plan to contribute $300 million to the venture, while Goldman Sachs will add another $150 million as a founding investor, bringing its total capital to $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI and its partners say they plan to inject as much as $10 billion into the Deployment Company. They'll initially target their own portfolio companies, before trying to expand and target other mid-sized enterprises in areas such as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and retail. "We think there's a lot of value that this new entity can bring to companies to help transform them," Nachmann added.

Anthropic takes shot at consulting industry in joint venture with Wall Street giants | Fortune

The venture, backed by approximately $1.5 billion in committed capital, is designed to embed Anthropic's engineers and models directly into the core operations of mid-size businesses, according to the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter. The target market is enormous. For every dollar companies spend on software, they spend six on services -- a ratio that has made consulting a multitrillion-dollar industry and that AI-native firms are now positioning to disrupt. Sequoia partner Julien Bek argued in April that the world's next great company won't sell software at all, but outcomes: legal services, financial analysis, insurance processing delivered by AI while billed like consulting. The Anthropic joint venture is essentially that thesis, capitalized and staffed. The new firm is a standalone entity with Anthropic engineering resources embedded directly within its team, according to the official press release, a structure that mirrors Palantir's forward-deployment model and undercuts traditional consultants by combining implementation capability with ownership of the underlying model. Alongside the three founding partners, the joint venture has drawn backing from General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC, and Sequoia Capital, giving it a built-in client pipeline across hundreds of portfolio companies. In an implicit indictment of the existing consulting model, Blackstone President and COO Jon Gray said the firm aims to break down "one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption," namely the scarcity of engineers who can implement frontier AI systems at speed. Private equity was a natural beachhead. As Fortune reported in November 2025, PE-backed CFOs already face mounting sponsor pressure to embed AI into planning, forecasting, and reporting, with 85% of buyers now factoring AI-enabled finance capabilities into company valuations. Firms that fail to integrate AI risk being penalized at exit. The Anthropic venture offers PE sponsors a turnkey alternative to hiring Big Three consultants at what is likely to be a fraction of the cost. "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said. "This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem." Goldman Sachs' Marc Nachmann added that the venture would help "democratize access to forward-deployed engineers" for companies that currently can't afford the talent -- or the consulting fees -- to build AI systems on their own. The announcement comes as rival OpenAI is reportedly pursuing a near-identical structure with TPG and Bain Capital. The future of AI revenue may not look like software licensing, but instead like consulting, rebuilt from the model up.

OpenAI and Anthropic partner with private equity

Why it matters: The two companies want to shore up enterprise adoption of their tools as they race towards IPOs that could come as soon as this fall. What they're saying: "There's a big gap between what AI can do today and the value the market is truly getting from it," Nicholas Lin, Anthropic's head of product for financial services tells Axios. * Anthropic has an internal applied AI team that works with companies to ensure they're getting as much as they can out of their tools, but there are limits on how much that can scale. * The joint venture will help Anthropic scale its support for customers while also developing deployment "templates" that can make it easier to copy and paste strategies for AI deployment across different firms. Zoom out: OpenAI and Anthropic have both been working to launch joint ventures with some of Wall Street's biggest firms to accelerate adoption of their AI tools, especially among mid-sized companies. * Anthropic is pursuing a $1.5 billion joint venture with investments from Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs in an effort to sell AI tools to companies, especially those backed by PE firms. * OpenAI has raised more than $4 billion from investors including TPG, Brookfield, Advent and Bain for a joint venture they're referring to as "The Deployment Company." Between the lines: AI companies have spent billions building cutting-edge models. * Now they face a harder challenge: getting companies to use the tools in an ROI positive way. * Private equity firms offer a built-in distribution channel via their portfolio companies, especially mid-sized firms that lack the in-house expertise to deploy AI on their own. * Demand is currently strongest for coding tools, but both companies are pushing into sectors like finance and healthcare to expand sales. What we're watching: The firms and Silicon Valley are betting AI can unlock efficiency gains in the mid-sized companies private equity targets.

Claude Is Coming to Your Office: Anthropic Announces $1.5 Billion Venture to Rewire Businesses

The firm, which has yet to be named, will sell AI tools to companies with the goal of integrating Claude into core business operations. The firm is expected to act as an advisory practice for Anthropic, helping companies quickly incorporate AI into their day-to-day workflows. Backed by a group that includes General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC, and Sequoia Capital, the firm's ties to asset managers, as well as the networks provided by the Wall Street firms, will give it access to a broad range of companies to design, build, and maintain AI deployments. Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are each expected to invest around $300 million in the firm, according to The Wall Street Journal. Goldman Sachs will invest $150 million in the venture. In total, $1.5 billion will be put toward this new company, according to the outlet.

Anthropic Just Unveiled a $1.5 Billion AI Joint Venture With Wall Street Giants -- Here's the Real Strategy Behind It

The battle for corporate AI dominance just got a $1.5 billion war chest, courtesy of some Wall Street heavy hitters. Anthropic is teaming up with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs to form a new AI services company targeting private equity-backed businesses. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Anthropic are each investing around $300 million, with Goldman Sachs putting in $150 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital are also backing the venture. The firm will deploy engineers to work directly with community banks, regional hospitals and mid-sized manufacturers to build custom Claude-powered solutions. The move comes as OpenAI is forming a rival joint venture with private equity firms. Both AI giants see PE-backed companies as prime targets since they're already focused on efficiency and cost-cutting. Anthropic is widely seen as the industry leader in selling AI to businesses, though OpenAI is working to catch up. Anthropic is also eyeing a public listing as soon as this year, fueled by skyrocketing revenue from its coding tool, Claude Code.

Anthropic and OpenAI move into enterprise services, testing India's IT leaders

Synopsis: Anthropic and OpenAI are shifting from building AI models to offering complete business services. Backed by multi-billion dollar investments, they are embedding their engineers with clients to design, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions that deliver fast results. This move challenges India's IT giants like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, while creating new partnership opportunities. In the end, success will go to those who deploy AI most effectively. Anthropic and OpenAI are entering a new phase of competition, one that could reshape the global IT services industry. Both companies are not just solely focused on building powerful AI models, rather they are now moving into full-scale enterprise services, helping businesses deploy AI in real world operations. On May 5th, 2026, Anthrophic announced a $1.5 billion joint venture backed by major investors including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital. The initiative targets mid-sized, private equity backed companies that need fast, practical AI adoption without building large in-house teams. This venture goes far beyond software. Anthrophic plans to embed its engineers directly with client teams to design, deploy and maintain customised AI systems. In sectors like healthcare, for instance, such tools can automate documentation and administrative tasks, allowing doctors to spend more time with patients. The emphasis will be on hands-on execution, not just technology delivery. OpenAI is also stepping up, reportedly building a standalone services arm and seeking nearly $4 billion in funding. The goal is to scale enterprise AI adoption globally by turning advanced models into measurable business outcomes. These moves signal a strategic shift as AI companies are no longer technology providers, they are becoming end to end transformation partners. This evolution introduces direct competition for India's IT services giants such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro. For decades, these firms have dominated systems integration and enterprise technology implementation. AI-native service models, backed by deep technical expertise and significant capital, could compress timelines and challenge traditional delivery structures. That said, Indian IT firms are not standing still. TCS has partnered with OpenAI, while Infosys is working closely with Anthropic to build industry-specific AI solutions. These collaborations allow them to combine cutting-edge AI capabilities with their strengths in execution, scale, and long-standing client relationships. The broader message is clear. The AI industry is maturing fast. Model builders are evolving into full-service providers, blurring the line between software and services. For India's $283 billion IT sector, this shift presents both disruption and opportunity. The winners will be those who move quickly, integrate AI deeply into their offerings, and focus relentlessly on delivering tangible business value. As AI adoption accelerates across industries, from healthcare to finance to manufacturing, the next wave of digital transformation will be defined not by who builds the best models, but by who deploys them best.

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.

Claude Opus 4.7 arrives: Anthropic targets Wall Street with powerful AI for finance

Anthropic is moving deeper into the financial world with new AI tools for banks, insurance firms, and other finance companies. The company announced updates under its "Claude for Financial Services" offering to make its AI more useful for big businesses. A major update is 10 customizable AI agents that companies can use for different finance tasks. These AI agents can do jobs like writing credit reports, making pitch decks, building financial models, doing market research, and checking financial statements. Anthropic also launched a new AI model called Claude Opus 4.7, which it says is better than its older versions, as stated by Yahoo Finance. The company says this new model performs stronger and is more advanced than its previous AI systems. Claude can now work inside Microsoft 365, including tools like Excel and Word. This means users can build financial models in Excel using company data and edit documents in Word using Claude. Anthropic is also allowing Claude to connect with more external apps and data platforms. New data connections include platforms like Third Bridge, IBISWorld, Guidepoint, Dun & Bradstreet, and Fiscal AI. Moody's has also created a system that lets Claude access its credit ratings and financial data. These updates come after Anthropic launched its Claude Cowork platform in January. That platform introduced AI agents that can handle tasks like organizing files and creating spreadsheets. The launch of Claude Cowork shocked the software industry and especially Wall Street. Many investors became worried that AI companies like Anthropic could replace traditional software firms. Because of these fears, several big software stocks have fallen sharply. ServiceNow stock has dropped 52% in the past year, as noted by Yahoo Finance. Salesforce stock is down 32%. Thomson Reuters stock has fallen 48%. Intuit stock is down 35%. Anthropic's strong push into enterprise (big business) customers has helped its revenue grow fast. The company says its 2026 revenue run-rate has crossed $30 billion, up from $9 billion last year, as stated by Yahoo Finance. The number of companies spending over $1 million per year on Anthropic's services has doubled in just two months. That number has gone from 500 companies to more than 1,000 companies. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic is now thinking about launching an IPO (going public) as early as October. Its rival OpenAI may also go public later this year. Q1. What is Claude Opus 4.7? Claude Opus 4.7 is a new and more powerful AI model by Anthropic that helps companies do finance work like reports, models, and research. Q2. Why is Anthropic targeting Wall Street? Anthropic is building AI tools for banks and big firms to automate work and improve speed, which is worrying traditional software companies.

The Battle to Own Banking's AI Backbone | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The immediate scope, which includes tools for underwriting reviews, financial modeling, know your customer (KYC) checks and pitchbook preparation, tells only part of the story. The larger one is that AI vendors are no longer selling into banking but embedding inside of it. Anthropic introduced AI agents intended for financial services tasks, including pitchbook preparation, underwriting support and compliance-related work. The company also said its Claude model now integrates more closely with Microsoft products and financial data providers including Moody's and Dun & Bradstreet. Anthropic's move arrives amid intensifying competition with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft for enterprise financial services business. Anthropic's newest tools are already being adopted by institutions including Goldman Sachs, Visa, Citi and AIG, while the company positions financial services as its second-largest business segment after technology. OpenAI is advancing along a similar path. On Tuesday (May 5), the company partnered with PwC on AI systems focused on forecasting, procurement, reporting, treasury and finance operations. OpenAI separately described the effort as an attempt to reimagine the office of the chief financial officer through AI-driven workflow coordination and decision support. The contest is solidifying around operational positioning. AI firms are attempting to become integrated layers inside banking infrastructure, compliance operations, fraud systems and treasury management. That positioning is arguably deeper than retail chatbot adoption because it touches the systems institutions rely on to manage risk, capital allocation and regulatory obligations. Financial institutions are confronting two competing realities. Consumer and commercial demand for AI-enabled financial services continues to rise, while governance concerns remain a central topic. PYMNTS Intelligence data provides a snapshot of banking's embrace of AI, where, for example, 73% of top-performing credit unions are developing new payment features with external partners. The practical challenge is not simply technical integration. Banks must determine whether external AI systems can operate inside environments governed by audit requirements, cybersecurity controls, model-risk standards and supervisory review. The issue is drawing attention from regulators. On Friday (May 1), Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman warned that AI capabilities are advancing quickly enough to require updated supervisory approaches. Additionally, in February, the Federal Reserve introduced broader internal AI systems for drafting, summarization and analytical support across its own operations. Meanwhile, FIS announced a partnership with Anthropic Monday (May 4) to build AI-driven financial crime monitoring systems for banks. Early deployments focused largely on customer service and employee productivity. The newer phase involves automating internal review layers that historically required large operations staffs, including transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, commercial loan documentation, dispute resolution and treasury reconciliation. Testing AI systems that can assemble credit memoranda, summarize regulatory filings, flag unusual account behavior and monitor software code changes for security vulnerabilities represents an even broader remit. The attraction is partly financial. Large banks continue to face pressure to contain operating costs while maintaining compliance standards that have become more demanding, labor-intensive and continuous. Those initiatives may improve operational efficiency, but they also deepen institutional dependence on a relatively narrow group of AI and cloud providers. For financial institutions, the central question is shifting away from whether AI can improve productivity. The more consequential issue is the embedding of those systems inside regulated financial environments where cybersecurity failures, operational interruptions and compliance lapses carry immediate supervisory and financial consequences.

Anthropic Targets Financial Services Space With New AI Agents | PYMNTS.com

The new agents are designed to automate the "most time-consuming" tasks in the financial services space, including creating pitchbooks and conducting know your customer (KYC) checks, the announcement said. Additionally, Anthropic's flagship AI model, Claude, now works with Microsoft business products, such as Excel and PowerPoint, per the announcement. The company also expanded its partnerships with various financial and data platforms, including Dun & Bradstreet, Verisk and Moody's. "Many leading banks, asset managers and insurers choose Claude," the announcement said. "It supports the full range of these organizations' work: front-office tasks like research and client experience; middle-office work in underwriting, risk and compliance; and back-office work like code modernization and operations." Anthropic's latest offerings are meant to "bridge the gap" between how quickly AI is advancing and financial firms' ability to use the technology, said Jonathan Pelosi, head of financial services at Anthropic, per a Tuesday report from The Wall Street Journal. "This is the difference between, 'We're using AI to help write better emails or do some basic research,' to an investment bank pitch-building," he said, according to the report. Anthropic and rival OpenAI have been focusing more on attracting enterprise clients, an area in which Anthropic has taken the lead. OpenAI announced its own financial services-centric effort Tuesday as it launched a partnership with professional services network PwC. The collaboration will involve OpenAI building AI agents focused on the "core operating rhythms of finance," such as forecasting, planning, reporting, procurement, payments and treasury. This marks the second day in a row that both companies' enterprise AI efforts made headlines. On Monday (May 4), OpenAI raised $4 billion to get businesses to adopt its AI tools, and Anthropic announced it was teaming with Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, to help companies integrate Claude. "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a Monday news release. "Our partnerships with the world's leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises. This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers."

OpenAI and Anthropic Step into Services Business as Indian IT Adapts

OpenAI and Anthropic are exploring acquisitions of technology services firms through separate ventures backed by private equity investors. The move is followed by an increase in competition in the enterprise market beyond model development. OpenAI has created a venture called 'The Deployment Company' backed by investors including TPG, Bain Capital, and Brookfield Asset Management. Anthropic is building a similar initiative with support from Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. The ventures are looking at firms that help companies integrate automation tools into software systems, customer operations, internal workflows, and data infrastructure. Reuters reported that is already in advanced talks with three acquisition targets. The push signals a shift in strategy. Leading AI companies are seeking a larger role in enterprise implementation and consulting rather than limiting themselves to selling models through APIs and subscriptions.

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 Launches Enterprise AI Firm With Wall Street Giants | PYMNTS.com

This effort is being launched in partnership with Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street bank said Monday (May 4), in conjunction with investment firm Blackstone, and private equity group Hellman & Friedman, and will help companies embed Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence (AI) model into their businessses. "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Krishna Rao, Anthropic's finance chief, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. "Our partnerships with the world's leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises. This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers." Marc Nachmann, global head of asset and wealth management at Goldman Sachs, said the partnership will allow mid-market companies to employ Anthropic's tech to bolster their businesses. "By democratizing access to forward-deployed engineers, the new company can help the expansive network of portfolio companies in our Asset Management business and other companies of similar sizes accelerate AI adoption to grow and scale their operations," he added. In addition the founding partners, the new company is backed by a group of alternative asset managers including General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital, the release said. While the announcement did not include financial figures, a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter, said the partners are expected to commit $1.5 billion. 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, 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.

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 deepens finance push with 10 new AI agents for banks, insurers

NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - Artificial-intelligence lab Anthropic is diving deeper into the financial services industry, releasing software on Tuesday that can speed up myriad tasks for banks, insurers and other companies. Timed to an event Anthropic is hosting in New York, the startup launched 10 financially focused agents, or AI programs that carry out tasks with limited human intervention. These include agents that can build a pitchbook, audit statements or draft credit memos, Anthropic said. The company also announced more data sources that its so-called Claude AI can access to perform financial work. Not yet a year into unveiling ambitions to tailor AI for finance, Anthropic has rapidly expanded its business, with adoption by Goldman Sachs, Visa, Citi, AIG and others. Banks have scrambled to access its Claude Mythos model to shore up their cybersecurity. At the Tuesday event, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was due to appear on stage with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. Anthropic's drive to automate enterprise work has meanwhile hammered an array of financial, legal and software stocks, due to anticipation that the AI provider would disrupt or supplant their businesses. The San Francisco-based AI lab has said it wants to improve outcomes for customers, rather than replace them. In an interview, Nicholas Lin, who leads Anthropic's financial services product work, said an increasingly capable Claude would develop "vertical-specific intelligence," for instance in finance, even as the startup's AI is widely applicable across industries. These AI model advances, coupled with hands-on customer support and key office software integrations, were underpinning a rapid uptick in Anthropic's financial services business, said Lin. "I've honestly seen a dramatic change, especially in the past six months," Lin said. As part of the announcement, Anthropic said the 10 new AI agents could plug in to its Claude Code and Cowork products out of the box, and could be customized to a firm's policies and style. (Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Kenneth Li in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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)

OpenAI, Anthropic to launch AI enterprise companies: Here is what it means for us

Focus is on fitting AI into current systems so companies can use it easily and at lower cost. Anthropic has recently announced a new partnership to expand how businesses use artificial intelligence. The company has teamed up with major investment firms to create a venture that delivers AI services to enterprises. Earlier this week, tech firms like OpenAI also announced similar kinds of deals, which makes Anthropic's move more significant. Instead of asking companies to change how they work, Anthropic plans to fit its AI tools into existing systems. This approach shows a broader shift, as AI companies focus on steady growth and practical, real-world use across industries worldwide. This strategy may help businesses adopt AI faster, reduce costs, and improve efficiency without disruption to their current operations. The new venture brings together Anthropic with Blackstone and Hellman and Friedman as founding partners. Goldman Sachs is also part of the initiative. The project has drawn backing from a wide group of investors, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital. Reports say the venture is valued at 1.5 billion dollars, with Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman and Friedman each committing 300 million dollars. Also read: Apple may reduce reliance on TSMC, eyes Intel and Samsung Electronics for chip production This development came within hours of news that OpenAI is working on a similar effort. Its planned venture, called 'The Development Company', is expected to operate at a larger scale. It aims to raise 4 billion dollars from 19 investors at a valuation of 10 billion dollars. Investors linked to that plan include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital. Both ventures follow a similar idea as they seek funding from large asset managers to build stronger channels for selling AI services to enterprises. As a result, there is a common interest in increasing the use of AI technologies in the companies' operations. The other major aspect mentioned by Anthropic is engineering resources allocated to clients. According to Anthropic's presentation, an approach in which engineers collaborate closely with employees from various departments, including clinical and information technology specialists, has been used. Also read: Didn't get into GPT 5.5 event? Sam Altman's surprise might already be in your inbox, check details The idea behind the move is not to require the modification of existing processes but to adapt AI tools to them. Furthermore, all of those developments occur at a time when the number of startups focused on AI technologies has been continuously increasing and looking for ways of going public.