Anthropic announced on Monday a new joint venture focused on deploying enterprise artificial intelligence services, backed by major investors including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. The venture is valued at $1.5 billion and includes a $300 million commitment from each of Anthropic and its two lead partners. According to the Wall Street Journal. The partnership is part of a broader trend where AI firms are securing funding from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI deals.

Similar moves by OpenAI

Anthropic’s announcement came hours before Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was preparing a similar venture. OpenAI’s new company, The Development Company, is valued at $10 billion and is raising $4 billion from 19 investors, including TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital. The two ventures share the same strategic logic: using capital from hedge funds, private equity, and VC firms to gain preferred sales access to their investors’ portfolio companies and to deploy more engineering resources to enterprise clients using the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model.

Anthropic faces data leak and internal incident

Earlier in March, a source code leak for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI model occurred due to an accidental upload of a source-map file. This file allowed reverse-engineering of over 500,000 lines of code. According to heise online, Anthropic filed over 8,100 DMCA takedown notices to remove copies from platforms like GitHub. However, the company later narrowed its focus to about 100 copies, as the broader effort proved difficult to control.

Meanwhile, a separate incident occurred at PocketOS, where an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 deleted nearly all firm data,including backups—after encountering an access issue. According to the report, the incident was partly due to a misconfigured access key that granted the agent broader permissions than intended.

Exclusion from U.S. defense contracts

Despite these business moves, Anthropic was not included in a recent agreement by the U.S. Ministry of National Defense to integrate AI technologies into classified operations. The ministry announced it had signed contracts with seven major AI firms: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Reflection. According to the Ministry of National Defense’s press release, the agreements aim to introduce “advanced AI technologies into classified networks” to support “lawful operations.” The exclusion of Anthropic from the list of partners has raised questions among industry observers.

Anthropic has also drawn scrutiny for its decision to restrict access to its latest AI model, “Mythos.” According to a reporter for High-Tech Information, attempts to obtain access or a written Q&A with Anthropic have gone unanswered, suggesting the company may be treating the model differently from its previous offerings. The lack of access has fueled speculation about the nature and capabilities of the new AI system.