Anthropic Launches $1.5 Billion AI Venture with Goldman Sachs and Blackstone

Anthropic said Monday it is partnering with private equity giants Goldman Sachs and Blackstone to launch a $1.5 billion firm aimed at speeding the adoption of artificial intelligence across hundreds of companies. The new entity, formed alongside the San Francisco-based PE firm Hellman & Friedman, will deploy Anthropic's Claude AI model directly inside businesses, starting with companies owned by the investment firms.

The venture is also backed by a wider group of asset managers including Apollo Global Management and General Atlantic. Executives say the effort is designed to tackle a growing bottleneck in the AI boom: The scarcity of experts capable of implementing the technology inside real-world operations.

Marc Nachmann, Goldman’s global head of asset and wealth management, told CNBC in an interview that there is a big shortage of people who know how to apply these tools into businesses and then transform them.

Rather than acting as a traditional consulting firm, the venture will embed engineers inside companies to redesign workflows and integrate AI into core processes. Nachmann noted that having the model alone doesn’t change workflows or how a company operates. People are needed who can combine the technology with what is actually happening in the business and implement those changes.

Goldman and its partners expect to use their own portfolio companies as an initial proving ground for the new platform before targeting other mid-sized companies. The focus will be on the private equity-owned universe of healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail and real estate sectors.

The move marks Anthropic's latest effort to deepen its lead in the enterprise AI market as competition intensifies with rivals including OpenAI. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for massive IPOs as early as this year.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the $1.5 billion commitment of the firms involved. The new firm has not yet been named.