LLM giants just love private equity partnerships

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to ink deals with private equity players to embed their models into portfolio companies.

The benefit for the vendor is clear. Private equity portfolios are a great distribution strategy. The wisdom of betting primarily on one model family due to a partnership remains to be seen.

Anthropic announced that it is forming a new AI services company with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs to inject AI workflows via Claude across mid-sized companies.

The company is also backed by General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital.

For Anthropic, private equity portfolio companies are going to be a great distribution channel for Claude. Private equity firms, which own dozens of software companies as well as enterprises across multiple sectors, do these deals with the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Cloud to use forward deployed engineers to bring AI workflows to portfolios.

The Anthropic deal means the company will bring "additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers," said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao.

Indeed, Anthropic is just the latest LLM company to court private equity players to sell to entire portfolios.

OpenAI is launching The Deployment Company, an effort that includes TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Bain and others to embed the company's models into a portfolio that includes more than 2,000 companies.

Google Cloud in April said it launched a strategic partnership with Thoma Bravo to accelerate AI transformation. Under the Thoma Bravo deal, the private equity firm will give portfolio companies streamlined access to Google Cloud's AI platform including Gemini and Gemini Enterprise.

Thoma Bravo customers will also be able to attract new customers via Google Cloud Marketplace.

"Through our partnership with Google, our portfolio companies will be in position to build the next generation of AI solutions for nearly every process, function, and industry," said Thoma Bravo Founder Orlando Bravo.

On the surface, these LLM partnerships sound like an efficient way to drive AI transformation. Here's the problem: Most of these private equity deals revolve around standardizing on one model family.

IBM argued ahead of Think 2026 this week that enterprises shouldn't bet on one model. Private equity needs to deliver returns and "this pressure has forced major PE firms to move aggressively to formalize their AI strategies, including exploring joint ventures with leading LLM companies."

According to Big Blue, cookie cutter AI strategies and a single LLM will be challenged. IBM argued that enterprises will need a mix of custom models, foundation models, specialized models and grounding in your data and workflows.

It's clear IBM also wants in on the private equity distribution feast, but the company isn't wrong.