Anthropic announced Monday that it has partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to launch a new AI-native enterprise services company — one that puts the Claude maker in direct competition with the world’s largest consulting firms for the lucrative business of corporate AI transformation.
The venture, backed by approximately $1.5 billion in committed capital, is designed to embed Anthropic’s engineers and models directly into the core operations of mid-size businesses, according to the Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter.
The target market is enormous. For every dollar companies spend on software, they spend six on services — a ratio that has made consulting a multitrillion-dollar industry and that AI-native firms are now positioning to disrupt. Sequoia partner Julien Bek argued in April that the world’s next great company won’t sell software at all, but outcomes: legal services, financial analysis, insurance processing delivered by AI while billed like consulting. The Anthropic joint venture is essentially that thesis, capitalized and staffed.
The new firm is a standalone entity with Anthropic engineering resources embedded directly within its team, according to the official press release, a structure that mirrors Palantir’s forward-deployment model and undercuts traditional consultants by combining implementation capability with ownership of the underlying model. Alongside the three founding partners, the joint venture has drawn backing from General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, and Sequoia Capital, giving it a built-in client pipeline across hundreds of portfolio companies.
In an implicit indictment of the existing consulting model, Blackstone President and COO Jon Gray said the firm aims to break down “one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption,” namely the scarcity of engineers who can implement frontier AI systems at speed.
Private equity was a natural beachhead. As Fortune reported in November 2025, PE-backed CFOs already face mounting sponsor pressure to embed AI into planning, forecasting, and reporting, with 85% of buyers now factoring AI-enabled finance capabilities into company valuations. Firms that fail to integrate AI risk being penalized at exit. The Anthropic venture offers PE sponsors a turnkey alternative to hiring Big Three consultants at what is likely to be a fraction of the cost.
“Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said. “This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem.”
Goldman Sachs’ Marc Nachmann added that the venture would help “democratize access to forward-deployed engineers” for companies that currently can’t afford the talent — or the consulting fees — to build AI systems on their own.
The announcement comes as rival OpenAI is reportedly pursuing a near-identical structure with TPG and Bain Capital. The future of AI revenue may not look like software licensing, but instead like consulting, rebuilt from the model up.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
