On May 4th, Anthropic announced it had launched an Enterprise AI services firm. The new company is a combination of Anthropic and several of the largest private equity (PE) firms on the planet — Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs.
Pretty much the same day, a different roster of PE firms did the same with OpenAI.
But what drove them to make the same decision?
Between the PEs and the two biggest AI labs, in total, committed $11 billion to the same problem,
ie, get mid-market companies to use THEIR AI.
Because Anthropic and OpenAI managed to convince those overseeing the money to take on the risks on behalf of LPs (will explain soon) and portfolio companies, in exchange for a high-margin services business that outlives the investment.
The press release sells this as democratising AI for the mid-market.
I read the deal docs. Turns out, this isn’t an AI story; it’s about money, distribution, and the people who carry the risk aren’t at the deal table.
To see who’s actually benefiting and who’d suffer from it, we need to start with what the forward-deployed engineers actually do, why PE is the channel of choice, and the devil in the details.
