Anthropic has agreed to back a new independent AI consultancy in Europe with the London-based private equity firm Hg, the Financial Times reported on Friday — the first standalone consultancy the company has backed on the continent, and a direct move into the enterprise-services business long owned by Accenture and the Big Four.
The venture is expected to launch by the end of 2026 with hubs in London and Berlin, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the FT. Both Anthropic and Hg declined to comment on the report.
Engineers Inside The Client
The consultancy will embed its people rather than advise from outside. Consultants and engineers will work within European businesses to lead the design of new AI products, support projects already under way, and integrate AI into current operations, the FT reported. The firm will also take on work across Hg’s own portfolio of companies, which skews toward B2B software — Hg-backed businesses have been working with Anthropic since 2024, and portfolio companies named in coverage of the venture include the accountancy group Azets and the IoT provider AMDT.
Hg already employs around 150 AI experts who deploy the technology across its holdings. One person cited by the FT said the new venture will not replace that team, so portfolio companies that rely on it today keep the same support — the consultancy is an addition aimed at selling the same capability to the wider market.
Balance Sheet Money Meets Private Equity Funds
Anthropic will invest from its own balance sheet, while Hg invests through funds it manages, including the London-listed HgCapital Trust, the FT reported. People familiar with the plans put the ambition high: a target value above $10 billion for the venture within five years. Hg is one of Europe’s largest software-focused buyout firms, with roughly $70 billion under management, giving the new firm a built-in first market of portfolio companies before it signs a single outside client.
The Ode Template, Exported
The structure is a deliberate copy of a playbook the leading labs wrote this year. In July, Anthropic co-founded Ode, a US AI services firm, with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman, with $1.5 billion in planned investment and a backer consortium including Goldman Sachs, Apollo Global Management and General Atlantic. In May, OpenAI had launched its own Deployment Company with TPG, Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield to put engineers inside client operations.
The European vehicle extends the pattern across the Atlantic and sharpens the competitive point: Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC have been earning the fees for steering companies through AI adoption, often reselling the labs’ own models. A consultancy owned by the lab, staffed by its engineers and part-financed by private equity is built to take those budgets directly — a push that sits alongside Anthropic’s product-side enterprise expansion, including this week’s Google Cloud launch of Anthropic-managed Claude.
Why It Matters
The consultancy is Anthropic’s services business becoming a second front in its growth. Model subscriptions alone have to carry the cost of the company’s data-centre build-out and support the valuation it will take into its planned public listing — the FT frames the deal as part of Anthropic’s effort to generate revenue ahead of that IPO, and the company’s draft filing, which showed an $80.7 billion loss, underlined how much revenue growth it still needs to find. Embedded-engineer services are the highest-margin answer the industry has found: they convert a model into recurring implementation income, lock clients into one lab’s stack, and solve the deployment bottleneck that has kept enterprise AI stuck in pilots. Pairing with Hg gives Anthropic distribution no sales force could match — dozens of software companies already inside one owner’s portfolio — and it signals that the labs no longer intend to leave the implementation layer, and its fees, to the traditional consultancies.
Background
Anthropic’s move into services began in the United States in July 2026 with Ode, its standalone services company with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. Hg, founded in London and focused on software and services buyouts, has worked with Anthropic through its portfolio companies since 2024; the European consultancy would be the pair’s first jointly owned business, and the first standalone consultancy Anthropic has backed outside the US.
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