Anthropic Partners With Blackstone (BX) and Goldman Sachs (GS) in $1.5B AI Deal

TLDR

• Anthropic has confirmed a ~$1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and General Atlantic to sell AI tools to private equity-owned companies.
• Anchor partners Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each contributing ~$300M, with Goldman Sachs putting in ~$150M.
• The new firm will embed Claude AI into portfolio companies across healthcare, logistics, financial services, and manufacturing.
• Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate surged from ~$9B at end of 2025 to over $30B by late March 2026.
• The announcement comes as Anthropic eyes a funding round valuing it above $900B and a potential IPO as early as October.

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Anthropic confirmed Monday it has launched a new enterprise AI services firm alongside Blackstone (BX), Goldman Sachs (GS), Hellman & Friedman, and a group of additional investors, in a deal totaling roughly $1.5 billion.

The new entity is a standalone company with Anthropic engineering and partnership resources built directly into its team. It will focus on bringing Claude into the day-to-day operations of middle-market companies held by the participating private equity firms.

Anchor partners Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each contributing around $300 million. Goldman Sachs is in for approximately $150 million as a founding investor. General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC, and Sequoia Capital are also backing the venture.

The structure is deliberate. Private equity firms run large portfolios of businesses under constant pressure to cut costs and drive productivity — exactly where AI deployment pitches tend to land well.

Applied AI engineers from Anthropic will be embedded directly with the new firm’s team. They will identify where Claude can have the most impact, build custom solutions, and support clients over the long term, according to Anthropic’s statement.

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said enterprise demand for Claude is “significantly outpacing any single delivery model,” adding that the new firm brings “additional operating capability to the ecosystem.”

Blackstone COO Jon Gray said the partners intend to build “a scaled, world-class company” to deploy Anthropic’s technology across portfolio businesses and beyond.

A Race With OpenAI

The deal puts Anthropic in direct competition with OpenAI, which is building a similar vehicle called DeployCo. That venture counts TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield, and Goanna Capital among its backers. OpenAI committed $500 million to DeployCo, with an option to add another $1 billion, while the five PE backers combined for roughly $4 billion. The venture is targeting a $10 billion valuation.

Bloomberg separately reported Monday that OpenAI is nearing a deal for its own comparable venture, signaling that competition for PE-backed deployments is heating up fast.

Anthropic has built a stronger reputation in the enterprise segment so far, though The Wall Street Journal noted OpenAI is working to close that gap.

Anthropic’s Growth Trajectory

Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate climbed from roughly $9 billion at year-end 2025 to more than $30 billion by late March 2026. The company credited much of that growth to AI coding tools, including Claude Code.

The joint venture announcement arrives at a pivotal moment for the company. Anthropic is fielding investor offers for a fresh funding round that would value it above $900 billion — which would make it the most valuable AI startup in the world, surpassing OpenAI’s latest valuation of $852 billion.

The round is expected to total $40 billion to $50 billion. A May board meeting is likely to determine whether Anthropic moves forward and on what terms.

Bloomberg has reported Anthropic is also weighing an IPO that could come as early as October.

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