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

Anthropic announced a joint venture focusing on deploying enterprise AI services. Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs are founding partners. A group of venture capital firms, hedge funds, and private equity firms including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital are backing the venture. The Wall Street Journal reported the new venture is valued at 1.5 billion dollars. This includes 300 million dollar commitments each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman and Friedman. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is raising funds for a new venture called The Development Company. The OpenAI venture would raise 4 billion dollars from 19 investors at a 10 billion dollar valuation. Investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital. There is no apparent overlap in investors between the two ventures. The logic of the ventures is to raise money from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI deals. The ventures will get preferred sales access to investors' portfolio companies. Investors will capture more value from resulting contracts. The new capital will allow more engineering resources for the forward-deployed engineer model. Anthropic said an engagement might begin with the company's engineering team sitting down with clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit into workflows that staff already use. Engagements like this will run across mid-sized companies across industries. OpenAI announced 122 billion dollars in new funding at the end of March against a valuation of 852 billion dollars. TechCrunch reported that Anthropic is in the final stages of its own funding round seeking 50 billion dollars of new funding against a 900 billion dollar valuation.