Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) is in discussions with private equity firms, including Blackstone, Permira, and Hellman & Friedman, to form a joint venture that would sell its Claude AI technology to companies backed by those firms, according to one of the people familiar with ?the ?matter. As part of the deal, the PE firms would take an equity stake of approximately $1 billion, the ?person said, cautioning that the plans ? including the figures ?
are subject to ?change and no final agreement has been reached. The Information first reported last week that the Claude maker has been in discussions with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman to form a joint venture. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Permira declined to comment, while Anthropic did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
OpenAI is offering ?preferred equity? in the venture ? a senior class of ownership that gives investors priority returns over common shareholders and limits their downside, three of the people said.
In contrast, Anthropic is offering common equity, which does not come with those protections, one of the people said. The potential deals come as AI upends the calculus of private equity investing. The rapid advance of AI has rattled valuations across the software sector, made it harder ?for buyout firms to underwrite deals with confidence, and raised uncomfortable questions about the long-term viability of ?business models that automation could render obsolete.
In the enterprise AI market, Anthropic is widely seen as ahead of ?OpenAI, with stronger adoption among corporate clients. As of the end of last ?month, OpenAI's enterprise business generated $10 billion out of a total annualized revenue of $25 billion, one of the people said. The deal could also help ?distribute OpenAI?s enterprise offering, Frontier, one of the people said.
Launched last ?month, the platform anchors a program called Frontier ?Alliances ? through which OpenAI pairs its forward-deployed engineers with consulting giants BCG, McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini to help companies integrate AI agents into core business processes, Reuters reported last month.
