Anthropic, OpenAI race to build enterprise AI services ventures

Anthropic and OpenAI spent the same day making the same bet: enterprise AI is no longer just a software feature, it is becoming a services business built around implementation. Anthropic unveiled a new AI services company with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, while OpenAI was reported to be assembling a separate vehicle aimed at the same corporate market, but at a much larger scale.

Anthropic said its venture would work with mid-sized companies across sectors to bring Claude into their most important operations. The company said Applied AI engineers would work alongside the new firm’s engineering team to identify high-impact use cases, build custom solutions and support customers over the long term. The backing list was broad, stretching beyond the founding partners to General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital.

The pitch goes straight to the buying problem many enterprise teams still face: a model alone does not change a workflow. CNBC reported that the Anthropic venture was designed to deploy Claude first across private equity portfolio companies and then expand to other mid-sized firms, with initial focus on healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail and real estate. Goldman Sachs’ Marc Nachmann said there is a shortage of people who know how to apply AI tools inside businesses and transform them. That shortage is now shaping the market itself.

OpenAI’s parallel move underlined how quickly the category is shifting. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI finalized a $10 billion venture with private equity firms after raising more than $4 billion from investors including TPG, Brookfield, Advent and Bain Capital. The overlap is striking: both companies are chasing the same lesson, that enterprise AI buyers want access to customer portfolios, forward-deployed engineering and help changing operations, not just access to a chatbot.

For monday.com, that is the clearest signal yet about where enterprise AI buying is headed. At Elevate 2025 on September 17, 2025, monday.com said most organizations still struggle to turn AI pilots into lasting impact and positioned its own product shift around moving from managing work to actually doing the work. The company said it served more than 250,000 customers, introduced monday agents as a no-code agent builder and made monday magic, monday vibe and monday sidekick fully available, with first agents aimed at lead qualification, CRM enrichment and live calling of leads.

That puts monday.com in the middle of the same market transition. As Anthropic and OpenAI race to package AI with services, the buying decision will increasingly turn on whether a platform can be deployed by an internal team or whether it requires a consultant-heavy project that can prove ROI before the budget disappears.