Anthropic Hopes to Sell Enterprise Tech to PE Firms’ Clients

Anthropic reportedly wants to sell its Claude technology to private equity (PE) firms’ clients.

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup has been in talks with PE groups like Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman about this arrangement, The Information reported Wednesday (March 11), citing sources familiar with the matter.

One source said the conflict between the Department of Defense and Anthropic temporarily impacted discussions about the proposed joint venture, though they are still ongoing.

Another source said that some executives at Blackstone—whose CEO Stephen Schwarzman is closely aligned with President Donald Trump—are worried that it could be risky to announce an agreement with Anthropic while the dispute with the Pentagon is happening.

PYMNTS has contacted Anthropic for comment but has not yet received a reply.

The military ended its relationship with Anthropic and designated the company a supply chain risk last month after the company sought assurances that its AI would not be used to power fully autonomous weapons or for mass domestic surveillance operations.

Anthropic has sued the Defense Department in federal court to reverse the agency’s decision, and has argued in court that the supply chain risk designation is causing some customers to distance themselves from the company.

As The Information noted, this is happening at a time when Anthropic had been enjoying a boom in part due to enterprise demand for its coding and workplace automation tools.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence—from the report “Smart Spending: How AI Is Transforming Financial Decision Making”—found that more than 8 in 10 finance chiefs at large companies are either already using AI or considering adopting it.

“The growth of enterprise AI is emerging at a key juncture in the enterprise software landscape where, after years of software lockups across inflexible and monolithic solutions, corporate customers are increasingly demanding more from their B2B vendors because they know that more is possible,” PYMNTS wrote recently.

This moment is particularly consequential for B2B payments, the report added. Payments are at the convergence of finance, operations, risk and trust. They are repetitive, data-rich and traditionally manual, the type of environment where AI should shine. At the same time, they are unforgiving when it comes to workflow failures and downtime.

“There’s a continuous evolution and … dynamic disruption in finance that requires CFOs to harness data and AI to make finance more efficient, more effective and substantially more strategic,” Raj Seshadri, chief commercial payments officer at Mastercard, said in an interview with PYMNTS in October.