A new firm backed by Anthropic and buyout group Hg will put AI engineers inside European companies, starting with the ones Hg owns.

Blackstone made the same arrangement with Anthropic's Ode in May, and OpenAI's partners say they sponsor more than 2,000 businesses.

Hg already keeps about 150 AI specialists on staff to push the technology into the software companies it owns. Now it's building a company to do that work at scale, and Anthropic is putting up part of the money.

The London buyout firm and the Claude maker have agreed to set up an independent company that will place AI consultants and engineers inside European businesses, the Financial Times reported last Friday, citing people familiar with the deal. The firm is due to open hubs in London and Berlin before the end of the year. Anthropic and Hg declined to comment, and neither has released terms.

Anthropic will fund its share from its own balance sheet. Hg will invest through funds it manages, including the London-listed HgCapital Trust. The new firm will focus on software companies that sell to other businesses and on other white-collar sectors, and it will also take on work across Hg's own portfolio.

That last part matters most.

The Third Lab-Backed Consultancy Since May

None of this is new for Anthropic. It announced Ode with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs in May with about $1.5 billion behind it, and launched it under its permanent name in July. A week after the Ode announcement, OpenAI unveiled its Deployment Company with more than $4 billion from 19 partners led by TPG. OpenAI keeps majority ownership and control of its version.

Neither lab built its consultancy from scratch. Ode started from Fractional AI, a firm it bought in May, and has since bought Casper Studios. OpenAI bought Tomoro, which came with about 150 forward-deployed engineers. The labs are buying the people who already do this work and putting their own names over the door.

The reason is simple. Companies spend roughly six dollars on services for every dollar they spend on software, Fortune noted when Ode was announced. A lab that only sells access to its model leaves most of that money with Accenture, Deloitte and everyone else who bills by the hour.

The Owner Picks the Consultant

What sets these firms apart from an ordinary consulting startup is who stands behind them. Blackstone said from day one that Ode would serve its own portfolio companies. OpenAI says its partners together sponsor more than 2,000 businesses. Hg's new firm will work alongside its in-house AI team rather than replace it, one source told the FT.

Inside a private equity portfolio, a company doesn't always get to choose its consultant. Its owner can choose for it. That hands each lab a client list before it has finished hiring, and lets it skip the long enterprise sales cycle that slows down everyone else.

OpenAI is reportedly paying for that access. The FT reported in May that OpenAI guaranteed its private equity investors a 17.5% annual return, though Reuters couldn't confirm it.

The buyout firms need this as much as the labs do. Fear of AI drove a sell-off in software stocks earlier this year, and owners now have to show that the companies they bought over the past decade can come through it before they try to sell them. This week we covered an H.I.G. Capital loan that lets a German construction company hold off its lenders by citing AI disruption. A consultancy that rebuilds portfolio companies around Claude is the more hopeful response to the same fear.

Accenture Isn't the Obvious Loser

Accenture's shares fell more than 4% the day the FT story ran, and that made for an easy headline. The rest of Accenture's year makes it harder to read.

The stock dropped 9.6% on February 3, when Anthropic released AI automation tools that investors took as a threat to consulting. By late June, shares that had peaked at $291.09 in January were trading below $120. In September, Accenture and Anthropic each committed at least $1 billion over five years to AI safety testing run by Accenture's Faculty unit, and the stock jumped more than 8% after hours. Then came 12 straight up sessions in October and a gain of about 37%.

A 4% dip after that run looks at least as much like profit-taking as a judgment on Anthropic's plans. City AM found afterward that Accenture and Capgemini barely moved over the following weekend.

The big consultancies are hedging, too. McKinsey, Capgemini and Goldman Sachs are among the investors in OpenAI's Deployment Company. Accenture now competes with Anthropic for European deployment work while Anthropic pays it to test Claude's safety.

The Independence Problem

Consultants sell judgment, and part of the job is telling a client when a tool is wrong for the work. A firm part-owned by the company that makes the tool will struggle to say that. People City AM spoke to made the same point, and it's the strongest argument the incumbents have left.

OpenAI isn't pretending otherwise. Its Deployment Company is an extension of OpenAI, and Constellation Research put the odds of it ever recommending Anthropic at zero.

Anthropic's structure gives it more room to argue. Ode and the Hg firm are separate companies with outside owners, and Ode describes itself as Claude-first, willing to use a rival's model when a client needs one. That's a promise worth testing. A CIO at a Hg-owned software company should assume the recommendations will lean the same way as the cap table, and ask for the cases where they didn't.

What Comes Next

First, the deal has to be announced. Until Anthropic and Hg confirm it, the $10 billion target and the structure rest on unnamed sources.

Then the firm has to hire. Opening two offices by year-end leaves about two months, and both Ode and OpenAI bought existing firms to get moving. Watch whether the Hg venture buys a European consultancy of its own.

The timing also suits Anthropic's other plans. The company is preparing to go public in November, and a leaked draft disclosure showed a net loss of more than $80 billion for the first half of 2026, City AM reported. Services revenue tied to Claude usage is an easier story to tell public investors than another round of data center spending. Expect the consultancies to feature in it.

For years the labs told enterprises the model was the hard part. They're now spending billions on the evidence that it wasn't.