Anthropic is close to finalising a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman and several other Wall Street firms to sell artificial intelligence tools to private equity-backed companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The deal could be formally announced as early as Monday.
Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are each expected to invest roughly $300 million to anchor the arrangement, with Goldman Sachs contributing approximately $150 million as a founding investor.
General Atlantic and other firms are also participating, bringing total commitments to around $1.5 billion.
The venture is designed to function as a consulting arm for Anthropic, embedding its Claude AI models and tools into the operations of companies owned by its private equity partners and teaching those businesses how to incorporate AI across their workflows.
Buyout firms are under growing pressure to drive operational efficiencies across their portfolios, and AI-powered automation has become one of the primary levers they are exploring.
Blackstone alone manages more than $1 trillion in assets with portfolio companies employing hundreds of thousands of workers across real estate, infrastructure, private equity and credit.
Hellman & Friedman's portfolio spans enterprise software, financial services and healthcare.
The combined reach gives Anthropic a direct sales channel into thousands of companies that might otherwise take years to adopt AI tools through conventional enterprise sales cycles.
The structure mirrors OpenAI's recently announced DeployCo joint venture with TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield and Goanna Capital, which is expected to be valued at $10 billion and uses a similar "forward-deployed engineers" model to embed AI tools inside portfolio companies.
The parallel announcements suggest a pattern is forming in which frontier AI companies are using private equity distribution networks as a faster route to enterprise revenue than traditional cloud sales.
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Anthropic's annualised revenue surged from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $30 billion by April, driven primarily by enterprise adoption of Claude Code, but the company is exploring every available channel as it prepares for a potential initial public offering as early as October.
The joint venture would add a new revenue stream alongside Anthropic's direct API sales, its partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, and the $40 billion investment commitment from Alphabet and up to $25 billion from Amazon announced in recent weeks.
The recap
- Anthropic is finalizing a $1.5 billion joint venture
- Deal aims to sell AI tools to private-equity-backed companies
- Blackstone and Hellman expected to invest roughly $300 million each
