Anthropic and OpenAI are in a battle for the hearts and minds of enterprises. Now, both companies have enlisted reinforcements.

The AI darlings have separately struck multibillion-dollar deals with major Wall Street firms that aim to accelerate AI adoption in businesses. The deals signify the heated fight between OpenAI and Anthropic to cement themselves as the vendor of choice for enterprise as these firms race towards profitability.

News of both deals broke on Monday within minutes of one another:

• Anthropic inked a partnership with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to form a new “AI-native enterprise services firm” with the goal of integrating Claude into companies’ core operations. The firm is a standalone entity utilizing Anthropic’s engineering. It expands on a $200 billion deal these firms struck in April and is worth around $1.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• OpenAI, meanwhile, raised more than $4 billion from a host of investors, including TPG, Brookfield, and Bain Capital, for an entity focused on helping businesses deploy AI into their operations, according to Bloomberg. The joint venture, which is aptly named The Deployment Company, is reportedly valued at $10 billion.

The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic has never been more heated. The companies have been leapfrogging each other's models in capabilities for months and pushing new models and upgrades for Codex and Claude Code that aim to capture developer and enterprise attention.

The flurry of improvements also come ahead of each of these firms’ expected IPOs, with both companies anticipating going public in late 2026. With so many eyes on them and dollars flowing towards them, lining up contracts for businesses to use their tech is critical.

Our Deeper View

Though Anthropic has built its reputation around being an enterprise favorite, OpenAI has made a hard pivot toward the enterprise over the past several months. The company pruned consumer projects, such as Sora, to dedicate more resources and compute to its core models, and has been on a tear releasing new updates for Codex, including turning the coding tool into an everyday work agent. Additionally, its partnership with AWS is building momentum across the enterprise, startups, and government entities. Still, the arms race between these two firms is far from over, and the winner is still unclear. The competition is great for organizations looking to get the best deal on the most advanced AI solutions.