We end users no longer matter much to the AI giants. These companies are confirming that income is currently in the professional world, and they are already making moves to conquer that segment. And if they have to do it company by company, so be it, because now OpenAI and Anthropic are a little less AI companies and a little more consulting.
AI is more business than ever. Anthropic and OpenAI have understood that the real business of AI is not currently in individual $20 subscriptions, but in integrating their AI models into all types of corporations. Both companies have almost simultaneously launched alliances with other companies to provide consulting services. The objective is simple: to stop being external web tools to become the “operating system” of thousands of businesses through these exclusive sales channels.
Anthropic on the one hand… The company led by Dario Amodei has formed a joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman valued at $1.5 billion. This new firm will act as a consultancy bringing Claude directly into the operating environments of mid-sized businesses, from mid-sized banks to local manufacturers to healthcare systems. These companies have committed to provide $300 million each for AI engineers to work closely with these clients to integrate custom solutions.
…and OpenAI on the other. In turn, Sam Altman’s company has not been slow to replicate that initiative with the creation of the so-called The Development Company, an entity valued at about 10,000 million dollars. It is backed by funds such as TPG, Bain Capital and SoftBank. Theoretically, OpenAI has already raised $4 billion to accelerate the adoption of its AI models in more than 2,000 companies that are already part of those investors’ portfolios. The initiative is led by Brad Lightcap, until now COO of the company, and who wants to make the GPT family models an integral part of the operations of all types of companies.
Engineers on the line of fire. To promote these strategies, both companies are adopting the so-called ‘Forward Deployed Engineer’ (FDE) model, a deployment system that was already popularized by Palantir and that consulting firms traditionally use. Instead of simply selling an API, Anthropic and OpenAI will send their engineers to work with doctors, financial analysts, or IT staff so that their AI models can be seamlessly integrated into those professionals’ real-world workflows.
Going public as a goal. In recent months we seem to be experiencing a race against the clock towards the IPO in both cases. With absolutely stratospheric valuations (OpenAI 852 billionAnthropic hanging around 900,000 million), the pressure to justify these figures to the public market is immense. The integration of programming tools such as Claude Code has been a clear driver of recent growth, but the real gold mine is in the automation of processes in sectors such as health or finance. If you are joint ventures fail to scale quickly, the valuation bubble could deflate before those IPOs.
Conflicts of interest. When a venture capital fund invests in a technology provider and simultaneously pressures its portfolio companies to adopt that same technology, competition ceases to exist. Many companies will not have much real choice based on product quality. What is reinforced here It is that “circular economy” in which innovation is not chosenbut is imposed by financial and business interests. The customer does not buy because he needs the tool, but because his own financial owner has a stake in whoever supplies that tool.
But wouldn’t AI automate everything? The dependence on the FDE model is paradoxical. Theory tells us that software must be infinitely replicable at zero marginal cost. However, these alliances show that AI is still not smart enough to operate without direct human supervision. We need someone to teach us how to use it well, the companies say, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are going to take advantage of that need even if what we really have is luxury personalized consulting. For now, AI will be more part of the services offered by a consulting firm than a truly autonomous “plug and play” tool.
New Job: Deployment Engineer. Now Anthropic and OpenAI will not only be AI companies: they will also be consultancies in need of manpower. That also serves as an example that although AI theoretically will eliminate jobswill also create new ones. Here we face a growing demand for “deployment engineers” —OpenAI already requests them—, professionals who are precisely in charge of adapting these AI models to the needs of companies that want to implement them in their daily lives.
And the data, what. There is another fundamental problem: medium-sized companies will not have much capacity to manage their data sovereignty. For Claude or GPT to function properly in the business, they will need access to critical workflows, medical records, or sensitive financial data. And when one cedes that control to third parties, they remain vulnerable. Not only that: the security of this data is compromised because in order to process it, it must leave and be processed in the cloud of an external provider. The AI models of these companies can also probably learn from these processes, although it is reasonable to think that Zero Data Retention policies will come into play (“No data retention”).
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