Anthropic advances $1.5 billion venture to sell AI tools to private-equity companies

Anthropic is close to forming a $1.5 billion AI venture with Blackstone (BX), Goldman Sachs (GS), Hellman & Friedman, General Atlantic, and other Wall Street companies. The planned company will sell artificial intelligence tools to businesses owned by private-equity funds.

That means the first customers will likely be companies already sitting inside buyout portfolios, where owners are always hunting for lower costs, faster work, better software, tighter cyber checks, and cleaner financial reporting.

The announcement could come as soon as Monday. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each expected to put in about $300 million. Goldman Sachs is expected to invest around $150 million as a founding backer.

General Atlantic and other investors are also part of the plan. The total backing is expected to reach about $1.5 billion.

Wall Street companies back Anthropic as private-equity companies look for AI tools that cut real operating costs

The new business is being designed as a consulting-style arm for Anthropic. Its job will be to help companies add AI into their daily work. That can include customer service, legal review, finance, coding, cybersecurity, research, document handling, and internal data searches.

A private-equity company can test the tools in one company, then push the same playbook across other holdings if the numbers work. That gives Anthropic a way to reach many businesses through a smaller group of investors and owners.

The deal also puts Anthropic deeper into the enterprise AI race. OpenAI, Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), and Nvidia (NVDA) are all fighting for the same corporate budget.

Most companies are past the cute demo stage now. They want AI that can save money, protect systems, help workers find answers faster, and avoid creating a compliance disaster.

For private-equity companies, higher financing costs have made margin gains more important. That is the part Wall Street cares about. Nobody is writing a $1.5 billion check for vibes.

Defense officials still treat Anthropic as a risk while Mythos pulls interest from national security agencies

Meanwhile, Department of Defense CTO Emil Michael said on Friday that Anthropic remains a supply chain risk. At the same time, Emil separated that dispute from Mythos, the company’s cyber-focused AI model.

He told reporters that the Mythos matter is being handled across the government, not only inside the Department of War. Emil said the model has special ability to find cyber weaknesses and help patch them, so government networks need stronger protection.

The dispute started after the DOD and Anthropic failed to agree on how the agency could use Anthropic’s models. The Pentagon then placed the company under a supply chain risk label as a danger to U.S. national security.

Anthropic sued the Trump administration in March to fight the Pentagon’s blacklist. The cases are still active in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. One hard question remains open: how can the DOD use Mythos while the broader Anthropic risk label still exists?

Emil said the Pentagon still wants guardrails. He also said those terms can be negotiated because each AI company has its own view.

After a meeting on the matter, President Donald Trump told CNBC that a deal between Anthropic and the DOD is possible. Trump also said the company is “very smart” and could “be of great use.”

Even with the risk label, the DOD has used Anthropic models to support military work tied to the war in Iran. The National Security Agency, which sits under the DOD, has reportedly used Mythos, Axios reported.

Emil said national security reviews must look at frontier AI models, including Chinese systems. He said the NSA and Commerce Department test models to see what they can do at the edge.

Also on Friday, the DOD announced agreements with seven AI companies to place their tools on classified networks for “lawful operational use.” The list includes Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk’s xAI, and Reflection, a startup building open-weight models.

The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.