Exclusive | Anthropic in Talks to Invest $200 Million in New Private-Equity Venture

Anthropic plans to invest $200 million in a new venture with private-equity firms to sell AI tools to their portfolio companies.

Anthropic is planning to invest $200 million in a new venture with major private-equity firms that aims to sell AI tools to their portfolio companies, continuing a push for business customers.

General Atlantic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are among the private-equity firms in discussions to back the project, people familiar with the matter said. The startup is in talks to raise $1 billion for the effort, the people said.

The new company would serve as a consulting arm for Anthropic that teaches businesses how to incorporate the startup's AI tools in their operations.

Anthropic and OpenAI are locked in a race to capture revenue from business customers eager to use AI to boost productivity. Both startups believe they are well positioned to benefit financially from broader use of their tools in workplaces across the U.S. economy, and are pouring more and more resources into efforts to win over such customers.

OpenAI is also in talks to form a rival joint venture with private-equity firms that spreads adoption of its own AI tools. It recently reassigned its chief operating officer to work on the project, internally called DeployCo, among other duties. Fidji Simo, a top OpenAI executive, wrote on X last month that the effort would involve sending engineers to work at these companies to teach them how to use the technology.

The Information and Reuters earlier reported on some details of the planned Anthropic venture.

Companies backed by private-equity firms are appealing customers in part because their owners are already trying to cut costs. Private-equity firms can also push technology decisions across their entire portfolios of investments.

Some investment firms are separately investing hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up companies in industries such as accounting and customer service so they can automate them with AI.

Anthropic is playing a more active role teaching customers how to use AI not only to improve employee productivity, but also to automate larger company functions. Last month, it announced a separate effort to spend $100 million to provide training and technical support for consulting firms that are helping enterprises adopt Claude.

Anthropic generates the majority of its revenue from businesses that use its Claude chatbot and coding tools. The company recently announced that it was on pace to generate over $30 billion in annualized revenue, and is talking to banks about a potential initial public offering.