The PE Playbook Comes for AI
On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, valued at $1.5 billion and including a $300 million commitment from each founding partner. Hours earlier, Bloomberg revealed OpenAI’s parallel move: a $4 billion fundraise for a venture called The Development Company, backed by TPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain Capital. Both ventures are structured around alternative asset managers, effectively turning portfolio companies into captive markets for AI deployment. This isn’t innovation. It’s financial engineering dressed up as enterprise strategy, with VC and PE firms essentially buying preferential access to AI models for their own holdings.
The Palantir Playbook and the FDE Grift
Both labs are embracing the forward deployed engineer (FDE) model popularized by Palantir, embedding engineers directly into client workflows. Anthropic’s announcement boasts about clinicians and IT staff building tools together. But let’s call this what it is: a way to lock enterprises into proprietary ecosystems while extracting maximum value from every contract. The investors capture fees, the labs capture data and lock in, and customers get a customized black box. Meanwhile, both labs are raising staggering sums, OpenAI at an $852 billion valuation and Anthropic seeking $50 billion at $900 billion. The real story is a massive concentration of power, with PE firms and AI labs forming an oligopoly that will dictate how AI gets deployed across entire industries. No CVEs were linked in this story.
Source: Techcrunch
