Anthropic takes shot at consulting industry in joint venture with Wall Street giants | Fortune

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