Key Highlights
- Anthropic and IBM are Partnering
- The first product featuring Claude will be an IBM developer tool aimed at software engineers to help them automate tasks like modernizing old code.
- Anthropic is using IBM’s long-standing trust and deep expertise with big companies to expand its reach
- IBM gains a way to offer its corporate clients Anthropic’s highly-regarded, cutting-edge AI models, complementing its own expertise beyond just code generation.
Two major players in the tech world, the cutting-edge AI startup Anthropic and the long-standing IT giant IBM, have announced a significant partnership. The goal? To make Anthropic’s sophisticated Claude AI models easily available right inside IBM’s own software and tools, uniting a fresh AI innovator with a trusted corporate technology stalwart.
Claude AI Arrives in IBM Software
The very first place you’ll see this collaboration in action is in IBM’s newest integrated developer environment (IDE)—a comprehensive set of tools for coders. This specific product is aimed at software engineers working in large companies. By baking Claude directly into the IDE, the partnership will help automate tedious development tasks, like the complicated process of modernizing old computer code.
This is just the beginning. IBM has big plans to quickly integrate Anthropic’s Claude into a wider range of its software products in the near future, bringing advanced AI capabilities to a massive business user base.
Targeting the Enterprise Market
This partnership is a key piece of Anthropic’s strategy to secure its place in the highly profitable enterprise market—meaning, selling its technology to large businesses.
Anthropic, based in San Francisco, has been aggressively pursuing this market for a while. Last September, it launched a product specifically for large companies called Claude Enterprise and currently boasts over 300,000 business customers.
The company has been busy striking other big deals too. Just recently, Anthropic secured its largest enterprise deal yet with the accounting and consulting behemoth Deloitte. This will make the Claude models accessible to over 470,000 Deloitte employees worldwide. They also have a prior partnership with the AI and data company Databricks, which focuses on helping business clients create their own independent AI workers, or “agents.”
Tapping into IBM’s Corporate Clout
For Anthropic, teaming up with IBM is a brilliant move. IBM is famous for selling IT software and the mainframe computers that power many of the world’s largest organizations. This means IBM already has a strong, decades-long relationship with big businesses, something Anthropic is keen to leverage to establish itself as a reliable AI vendor.
As Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, noted, “IBM knows how to navigate enterprise barriers.” They understand the existing tech systems (tech stacks), offer deep consulting help, and can manage major shifts in technology use (change management) across huge companies. The partnership is about combining Anthropic’s powerful AI with IBM’s deep-seated business expertise to make AI adoption happen where it counts most.
Interestingly, Anthropic sees massive international demand, with nearly 80% of its consumer usage coming from outside the U.S. As a result, the company is rapidly expanding its global team, particularly across Europe and Asia.
What IBM Gets Out of the Deal
For IBM, the partnership is a straightforward way to provide its corporate customers with easy access to some of the most advanced AI models available today.
IBM does offer its own set of AI models, called Granite, which are specifically focused on programming languages vital for their existing customers, like Cobol, used heavily in mainframe systems. However, IBM initiated the partnership with Anthropic after seeing how well Claude performed on their internal testing and recognizing a shared vision for corporate clients.
Kareem Yusuf, IBM’s Senior Vice President of Ecosystem and Strategic Partners, stressed that IBM is “really about AI for business.” He noted that while Anthropic’s models are highly regarded for their ability to help programmers write code, IBM brings something crucial to the table: enterprise expertise beyond just code generation.
Deploying technology inside a massive company is complex. As Yusuf put it, there’s much more involved than just “code generation,” including the entire process of driving, building, testing, deploying, and managing the lifecycle of enterprise applications. IBM’s strength is its experience in managing this entire, complicated process, which complements Anthropic’s innovative AI core.
In short, this collaboration is a classic win-win: Anthropic gets a fast track into major businesses via IBM’s established relationships, and IBM gets to offer its customers some of the most cutting-edge, high-performing AI technology available.
