Anthropic teams with Goldman, Blackstone and others on $1.5 billion AI venture targeting PE-owned firms

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron during the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026. Ludovic Marin | Afp | Anthropic said Monday it is partnering with private equity giants Goldman Sachs and Blackstone to launch a $1.5 billion firm aimed at speeding the adoption of artificial intelligence across hundreds of companies. The new entity, formed alongside the San Francisco-based PE firm Hellman & Friedman and backed by a group of asset managers including Apollo and General Atlantic, will deploy Anthropic's Claude AI model directly inside businesses, starting with companies owned by the investment firms. Executives say the effort is designed to tackle a growing bottleneck in the AI boom: The scarcity of experts capable of implementing the technology inside real-world operations. "There's a big shortage of people who know how to apply these tools into businesses and then transform them," Marc Nachmann, Goldman's global head of asset and wealth management, told CNBC in an interview. The move marks Anthropic's latest effort to deepen its lead in the enterprise AI market as competition intensifies with rivals including OpenAI. By pairing the latest Claude models with a built-in network of investor-owned companies, Anthropic is positioning itself to gain an edge in middle-market adoption of the technology. It's a key battleground as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for massive IPOs as early as this year. …