Anthropic and IBM have formed a strategic alliance that will see Anthropic’s Claude models integrated into select IBM software products, the first of which is a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Project Bob, now in private preview, which aims to help enterprise clients do things like modernize software. At its TechXchange 2025 conference in Orlando, IBM also debuted a new capability for AgentOps. The AgentOps practices unveiled at IBM Think in May was showcased here as a real-time governance and observability integration to help ensure autonomous agents don’t run amok.

VentureBeat emphasized how Project Bob is different than other AI coding tools, like GitHub Copilot or Cursor, in several ways. In addition to focusing exclusively on enterprise, IBM’s new IDE “maintains full-repository context across editing sessions” and can do things like automating, say, an update of “Java 8 to more modern version of Java and framework upgrades from Struts or JSF to React, Angular or Liberty.”

To do so, Bob “orchestrates” between AI models — including Mistral, Meta’s Llama, IBM’s own Granite 4 and now Anthropic’s Claude — taking a data-driven selection approach that “routes tasks to whichever LLM is best suited, balancing accuracy, latency and cost in real time,” VentureBeat explains.

Bob “understands the entire repository, development intent and security standards, enabling developers to design, debug, refactor and modernize code without breaking flow,” IBM VP Data, AI and Analytics Strategy Bruno Aziza told VB.

Project Bob is now testing among more than 6,000 early adopters who report “productivity gains averaging 45 percent, translating to meaningful cost savings” while maintaining privacy and security, IBM explains in a news post.

“As organizations move from AI experimentation to production deployment, they need solutions that integrate seamlessly” and meet strict IT requirements, things that IBM can deliver through its experience in enterprise software deployment and hybrid cloud architecture, the company notes.

IBM “has long had the ear of big businesses” and that’s something Anthropic hopes to leverage as it seeks to crack the enterprise sector, reports The Wall Street Journal, noting that Claude Enterprise, which debuted in September 2024, now has more than 300,000 business customers.

At TechXchange 2025, IBM emphasized agents and showcased new products aimed at helping clients optimize AI. Central to IBM’s AI strategy is watsonx Orchestrate, which offers more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and its partners. IBM announced that watsonx Orchestrate will integrate the open-source visual agent builder Langflow, led by DataStax, which IBM acquired in May.

Other tools getting attention include AgentOps, introduced in May and now getting real-time monitoring and policy-focused governance controls, per Storage Review.