Anthropic and OpenAI: AI Joint Ventures Redefining the Market

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Key Takeaways

1Anthropic partners with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs to launch an AI joint venture valued at $1.5 billion.

2OpenAI is preparing a similar initiative, The Development Company, aiming to raise $4 billion for a valuation of $10 billion.

3These joint ventures aim to leverage investor assets to create new enterprise AI contracts.

💡Why it matters — These initiatives highlight a growing trend among AI giants to partner with investment funds to accelerate their development and integration into the business world.

Anthropic Partners for Enterprise AI Services

On Monday, Anthropic announced the creation of a joint venture dedicated to implementing artificial intelligence services in the enterprise sector. Among the founding partners of this initiative are heavyweights from the financial sector such as Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. This new company also benefits from the support of several venture capital funds, hedge funds, and private equity firms, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital.

The Wall Street Journal, which was the first to reveal this information, specified that the joint venture is valued at $1.5 billion. This amount includes a financial commitment of $300 million each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman.

OpenAI Follows Suit with The Development Company

This announcement from Anthropic comes as OpenAI, its main competitor, prepares a similar initiative. Just hours before Anthropic's announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was raising funds for a new joint venture called The Development Company. This company aims to operate on a larger scale, with a fundraising goal of $4 billion from 19 investors, for a total valuation of $10 billion. Among the mentioned investors are TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital. Notably, there is no overlap between the investors of the two joint ventures.

A Common Strategy to Capture Value

Both joint ventures share a similar logic: attracting funds from alternative asset managers to open new channels for enterprise AI contracts. These partnerships are expected to provide privileged access to the portfolio companies of their investors, allowing them to derive more value from the resulting contracts.

The newly raised capital will also allow for more engineering resources to be dedicated to each individual project. This will be done by adopting the "forward-deployed engineer" (FDE) model, a concept popularized by Palantir.

Tailored Projects for Each Sector

Anthropic explained in its announcement that each engagement could begin with a collaboration between the company's engineering team and clinicians or IT staff to develop tools integrated into existing workflows. These projects will take place in mid-sized companies across various sectors and will be shaped by those closest to the work.

Fundraising and IPO Prospects

These new joint ventures emerge as both AI labs are raising funds at a steady pace while considering potential IPOs. OpenAI announced it had raised $122 billion in new funding by the end of March, with a valuation of $852 billion. Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported last week that Anthropic is in the final stages of its own funding round, seeking to raise $50 billion for a valuation of $900 billion.