The AI Race is Creating New Empires

Sam Altman is sitting in a courtroom waiting to defend OpenAI’s future.

Meanwhile, reports recently surfaced that the company has been missing internal growth targets while burning staggering amounts of cash to stay ahead in the AI race.

Most companies would slow down under that kind of pressure.

OpenAI appears to be doing the opposite.

On Monday, the company announced it’s helping launch a massive new Wall Street-backed venture designed to embed its AI systems deep inside corporate America.

And Anthropic is pursuing a remarkably similar strategy.

In other words, the biggest AI companies in the world are no longer acting like software startups.

They’re starting to become more like empires.

Where’s The Real AI Opportunity?

Until now, the AI race has mostly revolved around building larger and more capable systems.

That’s how companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google established themselves as the leaders of the current wave.

But there’s a growing problem.

Even though McKinsey estimates generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion to the global economy each year…

Most companies still don’t know how to fully use this technology.

Sure, there are plenty of companies experimenting with chatbots and internal AI tools. But deploying AI across an enterprise is much harder than simply asking ChatGPT to summarize an email.

Large organizations run on old software, fragmented databases and highly specific workflows that were often built over a span of several decades.

That creates a massive implementation challenge.

Solving that challenge could become one of the most important businesses in AI.

That’s why OpenAI is helping to launch a new venture called The Deployment Company, a massive effort backed by major private equity firms that’s valued at around $10 billion.

These firms include TPG, Brookfield, Bain Capital and Advent, which collectively manage trillions of dollars in assets and influence thousands of businesses worldwide.

The Deployment Company’s goal is to help these businesses build AI into their daily workflows. And it’s expected to do so by acquiring AI services firms and hiring large numbers of engineers and consultants to help companies integrate OpenAI’s technology into their operations.

To be clear, OpenAI doesn’t just want companies using ChatGPT.

It wants to deeply embed its technology inside how these companies function.

And Anthropic appears to be chasing a similar opportunity.

The company is reportedly working on its own $1.5 billion venture aimed at integrating its AI models across businesses owned by private equity firms, particularly in finance and other back-office operations where repetitive workflows are common.

That’s because AI could help these businesses operate faster and more efficiently.

For example, Microsoft reports that developers using GitHub Copilot can complete some coding tasks up to 55% faster. Klarna says its AI tools are doing customer service work equal to hundreds of employees. And JPMorgan says one of its AI-powered cash flow tools reduced manual work for some corporate clients by nearly 90%.

So now you have a powerful alignment of incentives.

AI companies want distribution and recurring enterprise revenue, while private equity firms want efficiency gains and higher profits.

So it makes sense for them to work together to spread AI through the corporate world as quickly as possible.

Doing that won’t be as simple as flipping a switch. It will require large teams of engineers, consultants and AI specialists working directly with companies to build AI into the way they operate.

But once these businesses build parts of their operations around AI, the result will be extremely hard to unwind.

That’s why I think these new ventures from OpenAI and Anthropic deserve more ink than they’re currently getting.

Because we’ve already seen how effective this strategy can be.

Palantir Technologies (Nasdaq: PLTR) spent years building AI and data systems that became deeply integrated into government and enterprise operations.

But the company didn’t simply sell software licenses. It built teams of what it calls “Forward Deployed Engineers” who work directly alongside customers to integrate its software into their operations.

Image: Richard Clark

That made Palantir’s software difficult to replace, a strategy that helped transform it from a niche government contractor into one of the market’s highest-profile AI companies (and also my top stock pick of 2025.)

This same strategy has also helped build some of the most powerful technology empires in history.

Microsoft didn’t dominate the PC era simply because it made software.

At its peak, Windows powered more than 90% of the world’s personal computers. Businesses standardized around it and entire corporate workflows depended on it.

The same thing happened with Amazon Web Services. It became enormously valuable because companies built their infrastructure on top of it.

Today, AWS generates well over $100 billion in annual revenue because so much of the digital economy runs through its systems.

Now OpenAI and Anthropic appear to be pursuing the same path that built past technology empires..

Here’s My Take

The AI race will likely be won by the company that achieves superintelligence first.

But the next phase of the AI economy could depend just as much on deployment as raw intelligence.

That’s what makes these new ventures so interesting to me.

OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t just trying to build smarter AI anymore. They’re trying to build themselves into the daily operations of the corporate world.

And if they succeed, the companies they just created could end up becoming some of the most powerful businesses of the AI era.

In technology, that’s how empires are made.

Regards,

Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing

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