The News
Anthropic announced a joint venture on May 4 with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman to build "a new enterprise AI services company." The venture has secured $1.5 billion in capital commitments. Anthropic engineers will be embedded inside mid-sized businesses, many of them PE-owned, deploying Claude Code and Anthropic's broader product suite as the operating layer of those companies.
The deal lands the same week as Anthropic's exclusive 300 MW compute agreement with SpaceX, a reported $30 billion run-rate revenue line, and an enterprise customer roster that now includes a meaningful chunk of the top tier of American finance.
The View
I have spent a lot of time around enterprise consulting firms, both as a customer of one and as a vendor competing against several. When I read the words "embed engineers inside mid-sized businesses to implement AI systems," I see McKinsey with model weights.
The McKinsey model (and I use it as a category, not a critique) has been the highest-margin services business in the world for decades. The pattern: assemble a small team of expensive engineers, place them inside a customer's organization, sit them on the executive floor, build whatever the executive wanted built. Sometimes a strategy. Sometimes a transformation. Sometimes a piece of software. The customer pays for the time. The customer pays a lot for the time. Because the engagement reshapes how the customer operates, the consulting firm acquires institutional knowledge that makes the next engagement, at the same customer or a similar one, more lucrative.
In 2026, the people doing the embedded work are AI engineers, and what they're embedding is software that gets cheaper to operate every quarter while remaining licensed by their employer. The economic asymmetry is striking. The consulting firm captures both the engagement margin (people-time) and the software margin (Claude API spend) for the same customer, with the customer's own data forming the moat against substitution. This is how a company with a SaaS cost structure and Big Four pricing power operates. Accenture has never had access to both sides of that equation.
The financial sponsors are doing something specific. Blackstone, Hellman, and Goldman collectively own large rosters of mid-sized PE portfolio companies. Their incentive in this JV is to use Anthropic's product to compress operating costs and increase EBITDA multiples across those books. The JV gives them a captive AI-deployment shop with margin economics they understand from selling consulting to their own portcos for years. That's a coherent thesis. It is also the kind of thesis that historically produces an oligopoly: three or four firms, mostly indistinguishable in marketing, with deep relationships to the top thirty-percent-by-revenue of mid-market American business.
When people ask whether the AI cycle is a "bubble," they're asking the wrong question. The better question is what kind of business OpenAI and Anthropic are becoming. The pattern is the firms they originally claimed they would disrupt: consultancies, agency businesses, white-glove service firms that bill hourly and never give up the customer relationship.
If the analogy holds, the comparable name on the New York Stock Exchange is Accenture.
Room for Disagreement
The straightforward counter-argument: consulting is a low-margin business once you take out the very top firms, and Anthropic won't look like McKinsey in five years because the engineer-embedded model is just the on-ramp for self-serve product. Under that view, the JV is a customer acquisition mechanism. Anthropic uses Goldman and Blackstone to land into mid-cap PE portcos. The portcos run on Claude for two years. The renewal is API-based and the engineer-time goes away. That is also a coherent story. I don't know which one is right.
Notable
- See Anthropic's own framing of the venture
- The financial sponsors collectively hold over a thousand mid-sized PE portfolio companies. The addressable market for the JV's services is, in practice, captive
- OpenAI's structurally similar "The Development Company" raise this week, at $4B from 19 investors, suggests the labs are coordinating on this organizational shape
Bottom Line
Operators of enterprise SaaS businesses inside a vertical the AI labs are now embedding in (finance, ops, procurement, HR): assume your software-only competitive moat is now competing with someone else's software-plus-McKinsey moat. Plan accordingly.
Hank Reed