The Great Enterprise Heist
Anthropic and OpenAI are no longer just building models, they are building captive markets. On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, valued at $1.5 billion. The pitch is simple: pay us, get preferred access to sell AI to your portfolio companies. Hours earlier, OpenAI unveiled its own raider, The Development Company, a $4 billion vehicle backed by TPG and Bain Capital. This isn’t innovation. This is legalized insider dealing, dressed up in press releases. Both labs are effectively auctioning off privileged access to their enterprise customers, turning AI deployment into a private club for the ultra wealthy.
The Forward Deployed Flimflam
Both ventures are embracing the forward deployed engineer (FDE) model, borrowed from Palantir. Anthropic’s own announcement describes engineers “sitting down with clinicians and IT staff” to build custom tools. This sounds noble until you realize it is a lock in strategy. By embedding engineers directly into client workflows, these labs ensure their models become irreplaceable infrastructure, not just a subscription you can cancel. The real story is the money: OpenAI is raising against a $10 billion valuation for The Development Company, while Anthropic’s venture is valued at $1.5 billion. This is a cash grab disguised as customer success. Expect portfolios to be held hostage by proprietary APIs and integration debt that will take a decade to unwind.
Source: Techcrunch
