The same Monday Anthropic announced its Wall Street joint venture, OpenAI announced one of its own. Different consortium, same shape. OpenAI's vehicle is called The Deployment Company, valued at $10 billion, with around $4 billion raised from TPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain. OpenAI keeps majority control. The partners between them carry access to more than 2,000 portfolio companies. The point of the structure is to push GPT into the operating layer of those companies, not to sell them seats.

Yesterday's post was about Anthropic doing the same thing with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman, at a smaller $1.5 billion. I read that as a one-off, a clever move from the lab that has been the more enterprise-flavoured of the two. The fact that OpenAI was running the identical play in parallel changes the reading. This is not Anthropic being unusual. This is the new shape of frontier-lab commercial strategy, and both labs arrived at it at the same time.

What both companies seem to have decided is that API revenue, however large, is not enough to justify what comes next. Capex commitments at this scale need a different kind of revenue. They need integration deals, multi-year transformation contracts, the sort of thing that gets paid for out of operating budgets rather than software budgets. That is consulting work. Business Insider reported on Monday that one insider called the Anthropic vehicle "the McKinsey of AI", which is honest enough to be useful. McKinsey, BCG, Bain and Accenture have spent decades building the infrastructure for this kind of relationship. The labs do not want to spend decades.

So they have rented it. The PE firms are not really investors here, or not only investors. They are introduction layers. Blackstone alone runs about 275 portfolio companies. The four firms behind OpenAI's vehicle collectively touch thousands. None of those companies is going to call up OpenAI cold and ask for a deployment template. They will, however, accept a phone call from their own owner suggesting they try one.

There is a quieter detail underneath. Both labs are heading toward IPOs this year. PitchBook is already warning that OpenAI's might slip into 2027, but the direction is clear. A frontier lab going public needs a story about how its enterprise revenue compounds without requiring every customer to hire prompt engineers. A McKinsey-shaped attachment, with templates and reusable engagements, is exactly that story. The S-1 will look better with it than without.

What I keep noticing is how short the path was. Eighteen months ago the consensus was that the labs would compete for distribution: which one gets into Office, which one gets into Google Workspace, which one wins the chatbot. That is still happening, but it has stopped being the interesting question. The interesting question is which one gets quietly embedded in the close-the-books process of a mid-sized industrial holding in Ohio, and who got paid to put it there.

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