AI laboratory Anthropic is launching an offensive in the enterprise market. Tech giant IBM announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic, integrating the latter's Claude large language model family into its own software products.
This New York-based tech giant revealed on Tuesday that the first product to integrate Claude will be IBM's integrated development environment, which is now available to selected customers. At the same time, IBM and Anthropic jointly released an enterprise guide detailing how enterprises can build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-level AI agents.
The companies did not disclose the specific terms of the deal. TechCrunch has contacted IBM for more information about the future of the collaboration.
Since the release of Claude Enterprise in September 2024, Anthropic has been aggressively expanding in the enterprise space. Just on Monday, the company also announced an agreement with consulting giant Deloitte to deploy Claude into the workflows of nearly 500,000 Deloitte employees worldwide. Anthropic said this would be the largest enterprise deployment for the company so far.
Market data is backing up Anthropic's enterprise strategy. A study conducted by Menlo Ventures in July found that enterprise customers prefer the Claude model over other AI models, including OpenAI. More notably, the study also found that the usage rate of OpenAI models by enterprises has been declining since 2023.
This series of actions demonstrates Anthropic's ambition and capabilities in the enterprise market. From technology infrastructure providers like IBM to professional services giants like Deloitte, Claude is penetrating all levels of enterprise operations. For OpenAI, which has long dominated the AI market, the competitive pressure from Anthropic is becoming increasingly real.
