SAP partners with Anthropic, NVIDIA, Palantir

SAP on May 12 used its Sapphire conference in Orlando to present what it calls an “Autonomous Enterprise,” a package of software, data and AI services assembled with outside partners rather than built entirely in-house. The company tied that push to a new SAP Business AI Platform and an SAP Autonomous Suite, saying the products are designed to let AI agents act inside finance, procurement, supply chain and human resources workflows. (news.sap.com 1) (news.sap.com 2) Anthropic, NVIDIA and Palantir were among the named partners SAP highlighted around that effort. SAP said the platform combines SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI in a single governed environment, with its Knowledge Graph used to map business entities, processes and relationships across a customer’s SAP landscape. (news.sap.com) Christian Klein, SAP’s chief executive, said the company’s focus is on business processes, data and governance rather than on owning every AI layer itself. “For the mission-critical processes of our customers, ‘almost right’ just isn’t good enough,” Klein said in SAP’s May 12 announcement. (news.sap.com) ### Why did SAP put Anthropic at the center of this launch? Anthropic and SAP said on May 12 they plan to expand their collaboration so Claude becomes a primary reasoning and agentic capability across SAP’s AI-enabled portfolio. SAP said Claude will be embedded across products powered by Joule and Joule agents, and connected to the new SAP Business AI Platform. (news.sap.com) Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and president, said the work is aimed at tasks such as “closing the books, rerouting delayed orders, or approving expenses.” SAP said Claude is intended to work across SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors and Ariba, and across other systems through Model Context Protocol, or MCP. (news.sap.com) ### What exactly is NVIDIA supplying? NVIDIA said on May 12 that SAP is embedding NVIDIA OpenShell into SAP Business AI Platform as a runtime for autonomous AI agents. NVIDIA described OpenShell as an open-source runtime with isolated execution environments, policy enforcement at the filesystem and network layers, and containment designed to limit damage if agent logic fails. (news.sap.com) Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s chief executive, joined Klein’s Sapphire keynote by video, according to NVIDIA. The chip company said the collaboration is focused on letting specialized agents run with “security and governance controls,” with SAP engineers also contributing to the OpenShell codebase. (news.sap.com) ### Where does Palantir fit if SAP is talking about agents and governance? Palantir was named by SAP as one of the partners tied to its Sapphire AI push in 2025 and again as one of the companies in the broader partner set around the 2026 Autonomous Enterprise launch. SAP’s May 12 press release did not detail a separate Palantir product announcement in the same way it did for Anthropic and NVIDIA, but it listed Palantir among the companies with which it is deepening partnerships. (blogs.nvidia.com) That matters because SAP is describing the platform as an ecosystem play. In its 2025 Sapphire announcement, SAP said it offered “an ecosystem of interoperable agents” that could execute end-to-end processes, framing partner participation as part of how Joule and its agents work across systems and lines of business. (blogs.nvidia.com) ### What parts is SAP keeping for itself? SAP said the core of its offer is orchestration, business context and governance. The company said SAP Business AI Platform provides the governed environment, Knowledge Graph, and Joule Studio tools for building agents and workflows, while SAP Autonomous Suite is the layer that executes business operations across functions. (news.sap.com) Philipp Herzig, writing in SAP’s May 12 post on the Anthropic tie-up, said SAP’s “open ecosystem approach” is meant to support any model while giving customers choice. NVIDIA, by contrast, is providing execution controls, and Anthropic is providing model-level reasoning and agentic capabilities inside SAP’s software stack. (news.sap.com) ### What is SAP saying comes next? SAP said the Autonomous Suite will deploy more than 50 domain-specific Joule Assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management and customer experience. Those assistants, SAP said, will orchestrate a subset of more than 200 specialized agents, including a new Autonomous Close Assistant aimed at shortening the financial close process from weeks to days. (news.sap.com) SAP’s next public marker is continued rollout through the products announced at Sapphire in Orlando on May 12. The named participants in that rollout include Anthropic for Claude integration and NVIDIA for OpenShell-based agent execution inside SAP Business AI Platform. (news.sap.com) (news.sap.com)