Anthropic plans to invest $200 million to establish a joint venture with a PE giant, promoting AI tools to portfolio companies.

ME News update: On April 7 (UTC+8), Anthropic is negotiating with several large private equity firms to form a joint venture. Anthropic plans to contribute $200 million, and the joint venture’s total fundraising target is $1 billion. General Atlantic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are all participating in the talks.

The new company will serve as an Anthropic consulting arm, teaching businesses how to operationalize Claude-series AI tools in their day-to-day operations. The PE portfolio companies are ideal customers: management is already looking to reduce costs, and PE funds can also roll out technology decisions consistently across the entire investment portfolio. Last month, Anthropic separately announced a $100 million initiative to provide training and technical support for companies deploying Claude through a consulting company.

OpenAI is also moving forward with a similar project. Its joint venture plan, internally codenamed “DeployCo,” also targets the PE ecosystem and recently reassigned its COO to oversee the initiative. Executive Fidji Simo disclosed on X last month that it plans to send engineers to clients’ sites to teach them how to use AI. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)