Anthropic and OpenAI launched competing joint ventures with Wall Street firms on Monday, turning private equity portfolio companies into a distribution pipeline for enterprise AI services.
Anthropic's unnamed venture is backed by Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs as founding partners, with additional investment from Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital. The Wall Street Journal reported the venture at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman and Friedman each committing $300 million and Goldman Sachs contributing roughly $150 million.
Hours earlier, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was raising $4 billion from 19 investors for a separate venture called The Development Company (or DeployCo), valued at $10 billion. OpenAI's backers include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent International, and Bain Capital, with no investor overlap between the two ventures.
Both companies are adopting the forward-deployed engineer model popularized by Palantir, embedding engineers directly inside client teams rather than selling AI as a standalone product.
"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," Anthropic said in its announcement.
Goldman Sachs' global head of asset and wealth management Marc Nachmann told CNBC there is a "big shortage" of people who know how to integrate AI with existing business processes. The new entity, he said, will embed Anthropic's engineers within customer teams to redesign workflows and integrate AI agents into core operations.
OpenAI's venture will be led by Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, who shifted last month to oversee enterprise sales and now reports directly to CEO Sam Altman. Its initial targets include the more than 2,000 mid-sized companies and clients accessible through its partners' portfolios. The synchronized moves come as both AI labs prepare for public offerings. OpenAI raised $122 billion in new funding at the end of March at an $852 billion valuation.
TechCrunch reported last week that Anthropic is in the final stages of its own funding round, seeking $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation, and is reportedly considering going public before year's end.
Anthropic's annual revenue run rate hit more than $30 billion as of March, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to SiliconANGLE. The ventures effectively function as AI consultancies backed by Wall Street capital, giving each company preferred access to their investors' portfolio companies while capturing more value from resulting contracts. Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said the speed at which both companies secured billions from top-tier investment banks and private equity firms, despite having no consulting experience, shows how aggressively investors are chasing AI exposure.
