Anthropic, Databricks Team Up in AI Venture --- The companies are aiming to help large businesses build their own agents

"Anthropic and Databricks struck a five-year, $100 million pact to sell artificial-intelligence tools to businesses, targeting those seeking to build their own AI agents.

Both Anthropic and Databricks are under pressure to generate revenue from AI that can justify their sky-high valuations, as they go up against some of the tech industry's biggest players, including Amazon.com, Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and OpenAI.

Based on the deal structure, Anthropic and Databricks expect to jointly generate $100 million in revenue over a five-year period, they said. The companies' sales teams will sell each other's products, according to Anthropic.

The companies declined to share additional financial details behind the commercial and engineering partnership.

The deal brings two of the largest players in the AI and enterprise-data space together around AI agents -- a technology that has claimed the better part of the industry's attention even as its value to businesses remains uncertain.

Anthropic's flagship Claude models will be directly available to businesses that store and analyze their corporate data in Databricks' platform, allowing them to build AI agents -- the technology that can take on tasks on behalf of humans -- using their own data, according to Ali Ghodsi, a Databricks co-founder and its chief executive.

Executives at the two companies said the partnership's goal is to better sell their technologies to large businesses, giving Anthropic and Databricks the opportunity to target the bigger revenues those customers typically bring in.

"Databricks has built up that trust with 10,000 customers," said Kate Jensen, Anthropic's head of sales and partnerships. "Anthropic is still relatively new, but continuing to grow extremely quickly."

Still, for enterprise software vendors and the enterprises themselves, the value of AI agents is an open question. There is a lot of hype around the technology, Ghodsi said, but the biggest problem with agents so far is their lack of reliability or accuracy.

When an AI agent is asked to do something for a business, it can't be right only 50% or 70% of the time, Ghodsi said, adding that the Databricks research team is focused on helping customers get their agent accuracy rates to over 95%. "That's on par with a human worker," he said.

Other software vendors, including OpenAI, Salesforce, Amazon and Google, similarly sell tools for businesses to use or build their own AI agents.

Databricks and Anthropic say that joint customers have asked for a more seamless integration between the two technologies.

Block, the parent of payments platform company Square, uses Databricks combined with Anthropic's Claude model, among others, to power its general-purpose AI agent. Thousands of Block employees are using Claude through Databricks for tasks like coding, said Jackie Brosamer, Block's vice president of data and AI platform engineering.

San Francisco-based Databricks makes money by renting out analytics, AI and other cloud-based software that taps AI-ready data for companies to build their enterprise technology tools. It raised an additional $10 billion funding round in recent months, valuing it at $62 billion, the company said.

Databricks, which was founded in 2013, bought AI startup MosaicML in 2023 for roughly $1.3 billion and is expanding the acquired company's services -- partly through its deal with Anthropic -- to get a piece of corporate AI deals.

Ghodsi said the company is eyeing an initial public offering at the earliest next year.

Anthropic recently completed a $3.5 billion funding round that values the AI startup at $61.5 billion. The San Francisco-based startup, which has emphasized its focus on the safety of its AI models, has been building up its name among large businesses seeking to use AI. It said about half the company's sales team focuses on selling to enterprises." [1]

 
1. Business News: Anthropic, Databricks Team Up in AI Venture --- The companies are aiming to help large businesses build their own agents. Lin, Belle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Mar 2025: B3.