Anthropic and Databricks have formed a strategic five-year partnership to enable companies to use AI agents based on proprietary data, with a revenue potential of $100 million. The deal brings two of the highest-valued AI companies closer together and targets customers who want to actively utilize generative AI for their processes, not just consume it.
As part of the collaboration, Anthropic's Claude models will be directly integrated into the Databricks platform. Companies analyzing their data in Databricks infrastructure should thereby be able to develop their own AI agents – digital assistants that can independently take on tasks. Both companies also announced plans to sell each other's products.
The pressure to justify the enormous company valuations is high. Databricks was recently valued at $62 billion, Anthropic at $61.5 billion. While Databricks generates revenue with cloud-based data and analytics platforms, Anthropic is increasingly focusing on the safe implementation of its AI models in enterprise environments.
According to Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, the biggest challenge currently lies in the reliability of AI agents. "If an agent only works correctly 70 percent of the time in a business environment, that's not acceptable," says Ghodsi. The goal is to increase the success rate to over 95 percent through joint research initiatives – comparable to a human employee.
Other providers such as OpenAI, Google, or Salesforce pursue similar strategies. However, companies like Block (formerly Square) are already relying on the combined use of Claude and Databricks, for instance, to accelerate coding processes through AI. According to the company, thousands of employees are said to work with this solution daily.
Databricks acquired the AI startup MosaicML in 2023 for around 1.3 billion dollars and is now expanding its services further. According to Ghodsi, the company could go public as early as 2025.
Anthropic, based in San Francisco, employs about half of its sales team in the enterprise segment. The now deepened partnership with Databricks is intended to help gain market share more quickly there.
