Private Equity

Two rival AI labs. Same strategy. Same day. This isn’t a coincidence — it’s a declaration of war on a $700 billion industry. On May 4th, Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to embed its engineers and Claude directly into enterprise operations. Hours earlier, Bloomberg reported OpenAI is finalizing a nearly identical play: a $10 billion venture called “The Development Company,” backed by TPG, Brookfield, Bain Capital, and 16 other investors. ...

The AI industry just stopped pretending it’s a technology revolution and started acting like a Wall Street dealmaking frenzy. Reuters broke the news on March 23: OpenAI is offering private equity firms preferred equity stakes with a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5% to lure them into joint ventures focused on enterprise AI deployment. The company behind ChatGPT is essentially paying buyout firms to help it sell AI to their portfolio companies — because rival Anthropic is running the same playbook. ...