Anthropic’s new technique for nabbing customers: Partner with the companies that own them.
The AI giant is rolling out a consulting business with the help of Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman. That group will serve as the founding partners, but investing giants like General Atlantic, Apollo, and Sequoia Capital are also backers.
BI’s Alex Nicoll and Reed Alexander have more on what one insider described as the “McKinsey of AI.”
The company wants to work with everyone from community banks to mid-sized manufacturers who “stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources to build and run frontier deployments,” according to Anthropic’s news release.
And wouldn’t you know, Anthropic’s biggest rival has the same idea. Bloomberg reported Monday that OpenAI is spinning out its own consulting consortium. This one is with the help of TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain.
On paper, everybody involved in these types of partnerships wins.
Anthropic and OpenAI get a direct line to a lot of potential customers via their backers’ massive portfolios. The finance firms streamline how quickly their portcos start using AI, which hopefully supercharges their investments. The portfolio companies get engineers from the world’s top AI startups to help them figure out how best to use AI.
Wall Street competitors are getting chummy in the AI era.
Apollo president James Zelter said at the Milken conference on Monday that competition is a lot less “brutal” because there’s a “big ocean” of opportunities, writes BI’s Bradley Saacks.
There’s a good reason for that. These AI bets require a lot of money, so there’s power in numbers.
(Bradley and BI’s Ben Bergman are both at Milken, if you’re around.)
The frenemies approach has been happening for a while on the tech side. The fight for compute and power has created a spiderweb of deals with plenty of commingling between rivals.
As cutthroat as Wall Street is, it also has a history of partnering up, especially when tech threatens to upend its business.
Three decades ago, banks recognized that the stock market’s electronification could happen in fixed income. Eager to protect a core part of their businesses, they launched their own electronic trading venue. They eventually sold their majority stake, but the venture still stands, and is now a public company: Tradeweb.
It doesn’t always work out that smoothly, though.
More recently, as blockchain tech seemed poised to disrupt the banking system, firms looked to join forces. R3 was founded in 2014 to create a unified blockchain system for financial services. It wasn’t long before defections killed the hopes of having one blockchain to rule them all.
As long as OpenAI and Anthropic can get these portfolio companies cooking with AI, all should be fine. The only problem is if one gets a lot better at it than the other.
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