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Anthropic is finalizing a roughly $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and General Atlantic to sell AI tools to companies owned by private equity firms, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The deal's anchor partners — Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman — are each putting in roughly $300 million, with Goldman Sachs committing around $150 million as a founding investor. General Atlantic and additional firms round out the capital table, bringing the total to approximately $1.5 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported that a formal announcement could come as soon as Monday.
Under the venture's design, the new entity would embed Anthropic's Claude AI inside businesses held by the participating private equity firms, handling both the advisory and implementation work needed to make that adoption stick. Private equity portfolios span industries from health care and financial services to logistics and manufacturing, giving the venture a wide pool of prospective Claude deployments.
OpenAI has pursued a comparable strategy through its own DeployCo joint venture, which counts TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield, and Goanna Capital among its backers, according to thenextweb. OpenAI put $500 million into that vehicle — with an option to add another $1 billion — while the five private equity backers combined for roughly $4 billion in commitments; thenextweb reported the venture is targeting a $10 billion valuation.
In the enterprise segment, Anthropic has built a reputation as the front-runner, though The Wall Street Journal noted that OpenAI is actively pressing to narrow the distance. PE-backed companies have become a key battleground for both AI labs, largely because the operational pressure those firms place on their portfolio businesses to cut costs and boost productivity maps well onto AI deployment pitches.
The joint venture announcement comes as Anthropic is weighing a major capital raise and a potential public listing. The company has drawn investor offers for a fresh funding round that would value it at more than $900 billion — which would make it the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing OpenAI's most recent valuation of $852 billion. The round is expected to total $40 billion to $50 billion, with a May board meeting likely to determine whether Anthropic proceeds and on what terms.
By its own accounting, 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 has attributed much of that growth to its AI coding tools, including Claude Code. Bloomberg has reported that Anthropic is weighing an IPO that could come as early as October.