Another day, another landmark artificial intelligence (AI) deal.
On Tuesday, IBM Corp. and Anthropic announced a strategic partnership in which Anthropic’s Claude AI models will be integrated into IBM’s integrated developer environment for software engineers. The collaboration represents IBM’s latest move to expand its AI capabilities.
Beyond the initial software integration, IBM plans to develop a comprehensive guide designed to help businesses build and scale their use of AI agents. The framework will incorporate Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard that enables AI models to connect with external systems.
The deal comes as technology companies race to embed advanced AI capabilities into their enterprise offerings, with large language models (LLMs) like Claude becoming increasingly central to business software platforms.
The partnership marks Anthropic’s continued push into the enterprise market, where the AI startup is positioning itself as a go-to vendor for large organizations. Anthropic has been aggressively courting corporate clients since launching Claude Enterprise in September, a product specifically designed for large companies. The company now claims more than 300,000 business customers.
The IBM deal follows Anthropic’s announcement Monday of what it called its largest enterprise agreement to date: A partnership with Deloitte that will bring Claude AI models to more than 470,000 employees across the accounting and consulting firm’s global operations.
Anthropic has also forged ties with AI and data platform Databricks in a partnership announced in March, targeting businesses looking to develop their own AI agents.
For Anthropic, the IBM collaboration offers access to the tech giant’s deep relationships with corporate America. For IBM, the partnership provides a pathway to offer its corporate clients access to Anthropic’s advanced AI technology. The arrangement complements IBM’s existing AI offerings, including its proprietary Granite models, which the company says specialize in legacy coding languages such as Cobol, a programming language that remains essential for mainframe computing environments.
In addition to the Anthropic accord, IBM introduced a suite of AI enhancements centered on its watsonx Orchestrate platform, which now features more than 500 tools and customizable agents from IBM and its partners. The platform’s new capabilities include AgentOps, a governance layer that provides lifecycle monitoring and policy-based controls for AI agents in production environments.
Six months after unveiling its latest mainframe generation, IBM is bringing AI agent capabilities to its Z platform through watsonx Assistant. The integration aims to democratize AI access across mainframe users, from system administrators to developers.
In the first major product announcement following IBM’s $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp in February, the company introduced Project infragraph. The new capability within the HashiCorp Cloud Platform delivers a real-time knowledge graph for enterprise infrastructure observability.
“It’s a unified knowledge graph for infrastructure, connecting application workloads with their related components and preparing enterprises for their AI-driven automation,” said Kyle Ruddy, senior director of product marketing at HashiCorp.
