Inside the Anthropic, OpenAI Deals That Are Reshaping Wall Street

The lines between Silicon Valley and Wall Street are blurring fast.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI, the makers of Claude and ChatGPT, made massive inroads with Wall Street and traditional financial systems this week.

Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion joint venture Monday with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman to help enterprises adopt AI more effectively. The deal landed Anthropic direct access to hundreds of portfolio companies across PE firms, said Will Trout, Datos Insights’ director of securities and investments. “That’s a distribution moat most [software-as-a-service] vendors would kill for.”

That same day, OpenAI announced raising more than $4 billion from firms including Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital to launch a similar enterprise-focused effort. The premise for both deals is that you can’t wait for enterprises to adopt AI, Trout added. “Goldman Sachs as an anchor investor [is] signaling Wall Street credibility, not just capital.” 

Partnership Play

During an Anthropic event Tuesday, CEO Dario Amodei argued that Wall Street’s AI buildout is essential and that SaaS companies that don’t embrace generative tech might not survive. He was accompanied on stage by none other than Jamie Dimon, a huge tell, Trout said. “When the CEO of JPMorgan is publicly excited about a tool, it signals confidence, not just in Claude’s capability, but in the business relationship,” he said. “That’s what these announcements telegraph.”

Other tech companies like Microsoft and Google are also making noise, but they’re not anchoring ventures with PE firms at the same scale. “You need to embed engineers and deployment muscles inside their operations,” Trout said.  

Anthropic also announced another partnership this week, alongside new tech rollouts, highlighting the firm’s growing influence on Wall Street:

• On Monday, it revealed a partnership with Fidelity National Information Services that will include building AI tools to investigate money laundering and fraud.
• Anthropic also launched 10 AI agents Tuesday designed to automate routine work across financial services. The tools are aimed at banks, asset managers, and insurers, but could end up benefitting advisors as well.

“Client meeting prep, financial planning, tax-aware rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting, investment proposals, client reports; that is the day-to-day reality of running a wealth practice,” said Jack Morgan, vice president at Rise Growth Partners. 

Explain It Like I’m 5. Wealth.com co-founder Danny Lohrfink said AI is “moving from novelty to infrastructure,” noting the potential for more integrated planning. Those insights, however, will  need to be easy to explain, govern and use in client conversations. “Faster isn’t enough,” he told Advisor Upside.