“We’re excited to see Anthropic and OpenAI develop partner programs and try to standardize that because it was always, ‘Where is the channel’s place in this part of the ecosystem?’” says SHI International’s Ryan Sheehan.
“[OpenAI and Anthropic] are killing it in the industry,” said Ryan Sheehan, senior vice president of advanced solutions at SHI International, one of the world’s largest solution providers.
“We’re exploring those partnerships,” Sheehan said. “We’re excited to see Anthropic and OpenAI develop partner programs and try to standardize that because it was always, ‘Where is the channel’s place in this part of the ecosystem?’”
SHI and other partners are exploring how the partnerships will be in terms of incentives, co-selling opportunities, channel rep resources and key integrations with hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google with the hopes of making AI easier to consume for customers.
[Related: Pythian’s AI Model Via Google Gemini Drives ‘Million-Dollar Outcomes’ For Customers]
The ability to easily leverage OpenAI and Anthropic AI models and innovation on cloud or on-premise infrastructure will help drive the ultimate goal of the channel right now: providing AI solutions that produce results, said Intuitive.ai CEO Jay Modh.
“Anthropic is good at financial modeling and insurance and a number of things. OpenAI is good at conversational models,” said Modh.
He said AWS, for instance, forming a tight technology partnership with OpenAI tied to the AWS AI Bedrock platform is “greatly beneficial” to Intuitive.ai customers.
“There’s a long list of frontier models that are there. So multi-modal, multi-agentic AI-governance and orchestration platforms are the only way AI adoption is going to happen at scale,” the Intuitive.ai CEO added.
OpenAI And Anthropic Channel Programs Push In 2026
In July, OpenAI launched its inaugural Partner Network seeking to onboard skilled AI solution providers to join its three-tiered partner program focused on driving AI business outcomes.
OpenAI poured $150 million in channel investment at the launch of the program with the goal of training 300,000 certified OpenAI consultants by the end of 2026.
In March, Anthropic launched its Claude Partner Network focused on giving solution providers resources for new certifications.
Anthropic invested $100 million into the channel with the launch. As of late August, the AI firm reached about 85,000 total certifications issued across around 2,000 partner companies.
“So to see them investing in the channel is good, and we’re exploring those avenues as well,” said SHI’s Sheehan. “It’s interesting because the skill sets are new so they can probably pay a lot for top talent.”
OpenAI And Anthropic Hiring Top Channel Talent
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have hired veteran channel executives over the past year.
This includes Steve Corfield, Anthropic’s channel chief who was previously general manager of Salesforce’s global alliances and channels, as well as Colleen Kapase, head of OpenAI’s partner program, who previously led Google Cloud’s partner programs.
Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions, said his firm is seeking to build a deeper partnership with both OpenAI and Anthropic due to the partner program launches and channel champion hires in 2026.
“The fact that they’re household names and they were really the biggest and the first, I think honestly makes a difference in market momentum. We’re still really early days,” said Copie.
It will be key for channel partners to not only commit to either Anthropic or OpenAI. Instead, solution providers need to keep their AI offering open to provide the correct solution for each client use case, he said.
“So if we bet our business only on OpenAI versus Anthropic, that’s a little short-sighted. We’re going to have customers that are choosing Anthropic and running Anthropic on AWS, and customers choosing OpenAI and running OpenAI on AWS,” said Copie. “It’s all great offerings when it works for customers.”
