Anthropic and Private Equity Firm Hg Are Building an Independent AI Consultancy for Europe

Anthropic is about to become a consulting firm's biggest shareholder - or at least a founding investor in one. According to the Financial Times, the maker of Claude has agreed to create an independent European AI consulting firm together with Hg, the London-based private equity house that specializes in software. The new company, which is not an Anthropic business unit, is scheduled to launch by the end of 2026 with operations centered on London and Berlin.

The model is embedded delivery rather than advisory slideware: the firm will place AI consultants and engineers directly inside client organizations to design new AI products or shore up existing deployments, and it will also serve companies across Hg's portfolio, which spans software, technology and financial services businesses. Hg already runs a 150-person internal team of AI specialists that deploys AI across its investments; the new venture will work alongside that team rather than replace it. Anthropic has collaborated with Hg portfolio companies since 2024.

Money flows in from both sides: Anthropic is putting in capital from its own balance sheet, while Hg is investing through funds it manages, including the London-listed HgCapital Trust. Neither side has disclosed the size of the commitment, and the FT's report is based on sources rather than an official announcement - both companies have yet to publish details.

The structure copies a playbook Anthropic has already run in the United States. Earlier this year it partnered with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman to launch Ode, a similar independent services business backed by a planned 1.5 billion dollars, with Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global also participating. OpenAI made the same move in May, forming the OpenAI Deployment Company with TPG, Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield. The frontier labs are effectively building their own system-integrator arms instead of relying solely on third-party implementers.

The timing is not accidental. European investors and policymakers are pushing hard to close the adoption gap with the United States, and an embedded-engineering outfit is a direct way to accelerate diffusion. It also gives Anthropic a new revenue stream as it funds enormous data-center commitments and prepares for a planned IPO; the FT noted Anthropic's revenue growth slowed in the third quarter. Blackstone president Jon Gray said earlier this week that demand for Ode's services was growing "almost parabolically" and the firm could not keep up.

The losers, potentially, are the incumbents: Accenture and the Big Four - Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC - now face model vendors selling implementation directly, staffed with engineers who know the models better than anyone. The awkward part is that many of those consultancies are also Anthropic's resellers and partners, a tension Anthropic will have to manage as the venture scales. If the AI-consultancy wave holds, the next few years of enterprise AI deployment may look less like a services market and more like a vendor-delivered utility.