On March 16, 2026, Reuters broke a story that reframed the AI race. OpenAI is in advanced talks with TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, and Brookfield Asset Management to form a joint venture valued at roughly $10 billion. The PE firms would commit about $4 billion. In return, they get equity stakes, board seats, and early access to OpenAI’s enterprise tools — deployed across thousands of portfolio companies.
Anthropic is running the same play. The Claude maker is in parallel discussions with Blackstone, Permira, and Hellman & Friedman to form its own joint venture. Under that deal, the PE firms would take an equity stake of approximately $1 billion.
Both companies declined to comment. Every PE firm involved either declined or didn’t respond. The plans are subject to change. But the direction is unmistakable.
The structure of the OpenAI deal
TPG would serve as the anchor investor — committing the most capital — while Advent, Bain, and Brookfield participate as co-founding investors. All four firms would secure board seats in the venture.
The joint venture’s purpose: distribute OpenAI’s enterprise products across the firms’ portfolio companies. Together, TPG, Bain, Advent, and Brookfield control hundreds of billions in assets and own stakes in companies spanning healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, retail, and financial services.
OpenAI is offering preferred equity in the venture — a senior class of ownership that gives investors priority returns and limits their downside. It’s a structure designed to make the deal attractive to institutions that need predictable return profiles.
The Anthropic deal is different in one key way
Anthropic is offering common equity — standard shares with no special protections. Investors take the same upside and downside as everyone else.
Blackstone already has skin in the game. It holds a $1 billion stake in Anthropic following a $200 million investment in early February 2026 — making it one of the AI company’s largest non-venture, non-sovereign backers. That prior relationship likely explains why Blackstone is leading the joint venture discussions on Anthropic’s side.
The proposed Anthropic venture would follow a Palantir-style model — providing consulting services and hands-on implementation support to help portfolio companies integrate Claude into their operations, from workflow automation to data analysis to decision-support tools.
Why both companies are doing this at the same time
The answer is simple: both OpenAI and Anthropic are moving toward IPOs this year. Enterprise revenue is the metric that matters most before a public listing. And private equity firms don’t just represent investment capital — they represent captive enterprise budgets.
The global private equity sector manages more than $13 trillion in assets. A single distribution partnership with four major PE firms gives an AI company instant reach into thousands of portfolio companies — without building an enterprise sales operation from scratch.
Anthropic already serves more than 300,000 business customers and claims roughly 32% of enterprise large-language-model usage. OpenAI’s enterprise AI annualized revenue recently reached $10 billion. Both are growing fast. But enterprise sales cycles are long, and PE firms can shortcut them entirely.
The strategic logic
For the PE firms, this isn’t just a financial bet. Their portfolio companies face AI disruption. A direct partnership with an AI lab gives them a tool to defend and modernize those companies — while also providing a potential upside if the ventures succeed commercially.
For OpenAI and Anthropic, locking in PE relationships before IPO changes the competitive calculus entirely. Whoever signs the better deals doesn’t just win more enterprise customers — they win the gatekeepers who influence how thousands of companies budget for AI.
This is no longer a race to build a better model. It’s a race to own the distribution layer before the window closes.