Anthropic Making $200 Million Bet on New Enterprise Arm | PYMNTS.com

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This effort would see the artificial intelligence (AI) startup try to sell its tools to the private equity (PE) outfits portfolio companies as it tries to strengthen its enterprise customer base, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday (April 6).

Blackstone, General Atlantic and Hellman & Friedman are among the PE firms in talks to back the project, sources familiar with the matter told the WSJ. Anthropic is in discussions to raise $1 billion for the project, a figure that includes its $200 million, the sources said.

The new venture would act as a consulting arm for Anthropic that helps businesses incorporate the company's AI tools in their operations, per the report. The WSJ story follows previous reporting from The Information about Anthropic's efforts to recruit PE clients.

As the WSJ notes, both Anthropic and rival OpenAI are racing to claim revenue from business clients hoping to boost productivity with AI. Both companies, the report added, view themselves as well-placed to capitalize on the wider use of their products in U.S. workplaces.

"Anthropic has been repositioning Claude from a conversational assistant into a tool embedded in enterprise operations," PYMNTS wrote last month, referencing the company's flagship artificial intelligence product. As covered here, the company is expanding Claude beyond chat "into structured enterprise workflows, integrating the model into coding, document analysis and business process automation."

OpenAI is also reportedly working on a $10 billion joint venture with PE firms to expand the use of its AI tools. The company reassigned its chief operating officer to work on this effort.

The WSJ report also points out that Fidji Simo, a top OpenAI executive, wrote in a post on social media X last month that the company aims to send engineers to work at these companies to instruct them how to use the technology.

PYMNTS wrote late last year about the way PE firms are employing AI within their own operations, testing whether it can improve forecasting and identify risks earlier.

"The shift signals that AI is becoming less of an experiment and more of an operational requirement," that report said.

This evolution, the report continued, is most visible in the earliest phases of investment work. For example, Boston-based PE company BayPine has started integrating AI into its investment and operating workflows.

"Underwriting value creation from data and AI at the outset significantly increases the likelihood of successful implementation during the ownership period," Cory A. Eaves, partner and head of Portfolio Operations at BayPine, wrote in a June Private Markets Insights report.