Anthropic’s new technique for nabbing customers: Partner with the companies that own them.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
BI’s Alex Nicoll and Reed Alexander have more on what one insider described as the “McKinsey of AI.”<\/a><\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. This one is with the help of TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain.<\/p>\n On paper, everybody involved in these types of partnerships wins.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Wall Street competitors are getting chummy in the AI era.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, writes BI’s Bradley Saacks.<\/p>\n There’s a good reason for that. These AI bets require a lot of money, so there’s power in numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n (Bradley<\/a> and BI’s Ben Bergman<\/a> are both at Milken, if you’re around.)<\/p>\n