DEVOPSdigest

IBM announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the development of enterprise-ready AI by infusing Anthropic’s Claude, one of the world’s most powerful family of large language models (LLMs), into IBM’s software portfolio to deliver measurable productivity gains, while building security, governance, and cost controls directly into the lifecycle of software development.

Through the partnership, Claude will be integrated into select IBM software products, starting with IBM’s new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE), designed with advanced task generation capabilities for enterprise software development lifecycles (SDLC), including software modernization.

The IDE is available in private preview to select IBM clients and in early testing, with reported productivity gains averaging 45 percent, translating to meaningful cost savings while maintaining code quality and security standards.

“IBM has been the backbone of enterprise technology for decades because we understand what it takes to deploy at scale in mission-critical environments,” said Dinesh Nirmal, SVP, Software at IBM. “This partnership enhances our software portfolio with advanced AI capabilities while maintaining the governance, security, and reliability that our clients have come to expect. We’re giving development teams AI that fits how enterprises work not experimental tools that create new risks.”

“Enterprises are looking for AI they can actually trust with their code, their data, and their day-to-day operations,” said Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. “Claude has become the go-to AI for developers at the world's largest companies because of our focus on safety and reliability. This partnership with IBM lets us bring that same level of dedication to even more enterprise teams while building the open standards that will make AI agents genuinely useful in business environments.”

Using industry leading LLMs such as Claude, the new IBM IDE is built to enable developers to be more productive. It works in multiple languages and modes, but examples of potential leading use cases to help developers execute tasks across aspects of the software development lifecycle include:

- Application modernization at scale: Automated system upgrades and framework migrations and multi-step refactoring with context-awareness across large-scale codebases.

- Intelligent code generation and review: AI assistance that understands enterprise architecture patterns, security requirements, and compliance obligations.

- End-to-end orchestration: From initial development through testing, deployment, and maintenance, orchestrates modernization, testing and remediation tasks seamlessly while maintaining context across sessions.

- Security-first development: Embedding security directly into workflows, enabling “shift-left” vulnerability scans, expedited FedRAMP hardening and facilitating quantum-safe cryptographic migration.

As part of the partnership, IBM has created, and Anthropic has verified Architecting Secure Enterprise AI Agents with MCP. A guide focusing on the Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC), a structured approach to designing, deploying and managing enterprise AI agents. As organizations standardize on agentic AI to drive autonomous decision-making and intelligent automation, traditional IT processes will likely no longer be sufficient. This new ADLC methodology provides businesses with a purpose-built, enterprise-ready approach for the development, operations and security requirements for Enterprise AI agents.

Beyond enhancing IBM’s software portfolio, IBM is contributing its enterprise technology leadership to advance open standards for AI deployment. IBM will contribute enterprise-grade assets to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) community, including best practices guides, reference architectures, and open-source tooling developed from IBM’s experience deploying AI across thousands of client environments.

IBM is exploring plans to include Claude into additional IBM products as part of a product integration approach.