The price of renting distribution

OpenAI launched its Deployment Company yesterday with $4B from 19 investors at a $10B pre-money valuation. Anthropic announced a $1.5B parallel structure with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs within hours. The headline is convergence. The interesting number is buried.

OpenAI guaranteed its PE partners a 17.5% annual return over five years. That is more than double the standard 8% preferred return PE firms typically negotiate. The yage.ai analysis names this directly: OpenAI is renting PE's distribution channel at a steep premium.

Read the premium as a confession. A guaranteed return that high makes sense only if you treat the channel as scarce and the speed of getting into it as decisive. OpenAI is signaling that building a forward-deployed engineering organization from scratch — the way Palantir did over twenty years — would lose the window. So they paid 2x to rent one. The Tomoro acquisition, which brings 150 engineers from day one, is the same admission in a different form.

Anthropic took a different bet. Its joint venture is smaller, structured around bank partners as both investors and customers. Goldman Sachs sits on both sides of the table — it also funds OpenAI's vehicle . Anthropic paired the JV with a 10-agent finance library and Claude Opus 4.7 launched the same week. The pitch is reasoning-traceable agents in regulated workflows — every conclusion linking back to source data, every decision staying with the human investigator. Different product, different angle, same PE-distribution architecture underneath.

What the audit asymmetry actually looks like. A reader pushed back yesterday on the framing: cross-customer telemetry is old (every SaaS vendor has it). What's actually new is execution ownership. DeployCo's engineers will be inside client organizations making decisions on the model's behalf. The telemetry isn't user behavior; it's a corpus of model-as-operator decision chains — what was proposed, what was accepted, what got overridden, what worked over weeks. Clients see summary reports. The vendor sees the full graph.

Elsewhere this morning.

The US Commerce Department quietly deleted its May 5 page detailing the pre-release security-testing agreement with Microsoft, Google, and xAI. The link now redirects to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation with no explanation. Industry observers had read the original commitment as stable; the deletion does not necessarily end the program but it signals internal disagreement about how publicly to acknowledge pre-deployment government access. Worth watching whether the testing continues operationally while disappearing from the public record.

OpenAI also launched a cybersecurity platform called Daybreak for vulnerability discovery and patching, mirroring Anthropic's Mythos release. Same week, OpenAI offered EU authorities access to a cyber-permissive variant of GPT-5.5, while Google reported stopping a zero-day exploit it believes was developed with AI. The cyber-AI arms race is now actually a race, not a forecast.

The week's pattern. Last week the news was compute supply — Anthropic's SpaceX Colossus access, the $1.8B Akamai deal. This week is distribution. The vertical stack is consolidating at both ends: who controls the GPUs and who controls the path into the businesses that will use them. The middle — the model itself — is increasingly the easier part to commodify. That's the structural story behind every individual headline.

Corrections welcomed publicly.