Anthropic announced Monday that it has partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs to launch a new AI-native enterprise services company. This puts the company in direct competition with the world’s largest consulting firms for the lucrative business of enterprise AI transformation.
The venture is backed by approximately $1.5 billion in committed capital and is designed to integrate Anthropic’s engineers and models directly into the core operations of midsize companies, according to the company. wall street journal According to a person familiar with the matter.
The target market is huge. For every $1 a company spends on software, it spends $6 on services. At this rate, the consulting industry is worth trillions of dollars, and AI-native companies are now positioned to disrupt it. Julien Bek, a partner at Sequoia, argued in April that the world’s next great companies will not sell software at all, but will sell results such as legal services, financial analysis, and insurance processing provided by AI, while billing something like consulting. Anthropic’s joint venture is essentially that theory, with capital and staff in place.
According to the official press release, the new company will be a standalone company with Anthropic engineering resources embedded directly within the team, and its structure will mirror Palantir’s forward deployment model, reducing the burden on traditional consultants by combining implementation capabilities and ownership of the underlying models. In addition to the three founding partners, the joint venture has support from General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia Capital, and includes a customer pipeline spanning hundreds of portfolio companies.
In an implicit indictment of existing consulting models, Blackstone President and COO John Gray said the company aims to break “one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption”: the lack of engineers who can quickly implement frontier AI systems.
Private equity was a natural beachhead. as luck PE-backed CFOs are already facing increasing pressure from sponsors to incorporate AI into planning, forecasting, and reporting, with 85% of buyers now factoring AI-powered finance capabilities into company valuations, according to a November 2025 report. Companies that fail to integrate AI risk being penalized upon exit. Anthropic’s venture firm offers PE sponsors a turnkey alternative to hiring Big 3 consultants at perhaps a fraction of the cost.
“Enterprise demand for Claude has significantly outpaced any single delivery model,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao. “This new company brings additional operational capabilities to the ecosystem.”
Mark Nachman of Goldman Sachs added that the venture will help “democratize access to forward-deployed engineers” for companies that currently cannot afford the talent or consulting fees to build AI systems on their own.
The announcement comes as rival OpenAI is reportedly pursuing a structure similar to TPG and Bain Capital. Future revenue from AI may look less like software licenses and more like consulting rebuilt from models.
Regarding this story, luck Journalists used generative AI as an investigative tool. Editors verified the accuracy of the information before publication.
