AI companies are moving directly into enterprise services, opening a new front in their challenge to established IT services providers and consultancy firms, including those in India. Anthropic on Monday, May 4, announced a joint venture backed by a consortium of VCs, hedge funds, and private equity firms to embed its engineers and Claude models directly into the core operations of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). A day later, reports suggested that OpenAI is also finalising a near-identical joint venture with firms such as TPG and Bain Capital to help enterprises deploy its AI tools and services. Both ventures look to raise capital from alternative asset managers to unlock new channels for enterprise AI deals by getting preferred sales access to their investors’ portfolio companies. In exchange, investors stand to gain from any deals or contracts that follow. The Anthropic-led venture will work with mid-sized companies across sectors by adopting the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model popularised by Palantir, where engineers from the AI startup will work alongside the customer’s engineering team to identify where Claude can have the most impact, build custom solutions, and support them over the long term. Anthropic and OpenAI’s back-to-back ventures aimed at accelerating enterprise adoption of their respective AI services comes as both companies explore potential IPOs. In March 2026, OpenAI said it raised $122 billion in new funding against a valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic, on the other hand, is reportedly looking to close a $50 billion funding round against a $900 billion valuation. It also positions Anthropic and OpenAI in direct competition with some of the biggest IT consulting firms in the fast-growing market for corporate AI transformation. “This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers,” Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Anthropic, said in a statement. “Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model. Our partnerships with the world's leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises,” he added. Who are the venture partners? Anthropic said Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs are founding partners in the new venture, which has also drawn backing from General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, and Sequoia Capital. The diverse partner group could provide Anthropic with access to hundreds of potential clients across investors’ portfolio companies. The venture is valued at $1.5 billion, including a $300 million commitment each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman, as per the Wall Street Journal. Also Read | Why the Indian IT sector must course-correct amidst ‘SaaSpocalypse’ fears OpenAI is also raising funds for a new venture called The Development Company. While it is expected to be similarly structured, OpenAI is looking to operate the venture at a larger scale, raising $4 billion from 19 investors against a $10 billion valuation, according to a report by Bloomberg. Currently, investors in OpenAI’s venture reportedly include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital. How will this work in practice? While details of OpenAI’s venture are scant, Anthropic said that its newly formed organisation’s work will begin with its engineering team sitting down with the customer’s IT staff to build tools that fit into the workflows that staff already use. In its blog post, the AI company cited the example of a multi-site healthcare services group or a network of physician practices. “Clinicians spend hours each day on documentation, medical coding, prior authorizations, and compliance review [.] The clinicians know where time disappears in a shift and what good patient care actually requires. The company's engineers build around that knowledge, allowing clinicians to devote more time to patient care,” Anthropic said. “Engagements like this will run across mid-sized companies across industries, each shaped by the people closest to the work,” it added. Threat to traditional IT services model? By combining implementation capability with ownership of the underlying model, Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest moves could potentially disrupt traditional IT majors focused on enterprise software integration and consulting services. Earlier this year, investor fears that AI agents and AI-driven automation will cannibalise the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry led to a major sell-off of IT stocks, including in India, with big names such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL Technologies nosediving 4-7 per cent and the Nifty IT index plunging nearly 6 per cent, the biggest single-day fall since COVID-19. These fears of a looming ‘SaaSpocalypse’ (a reference to SaaS companies facing potential obsolescence due to AI disruption) were triggered by the debut of Anthropic’s suite of workplace automation tools such as legal-focused plugins available in Claude Cowork on paid plans. However, many have pushed back against this narrative. For instance, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that SaaS firms will continue to be relevant as AI agents are likely to use their software platforms and tools on behalf of users. Also Read | Can Indian IT bridge the AI ‘deployment gap’? Infosys chief says that’s possible, as software major ties up with Anthropic Offering a slightly different perspective, Sequoia Capital partner Julien Beck has said that the most defensible companies will be the ones delivering services rather than software. “The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm [.] If you sell the tool, you’re in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with,” Beck wrote in a blog post published in March 2026. To be sure, Anthropic has existing partnerships with consulting majors such as Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and other system integration firms to help organisations across every major industry deploy Claude AI services. “Systems integrators in the Claude Partner Network lead that work for the world’s largest enterprises today, and we are continuing to invest deeply in those partnerships as Claude reaches more customers,” Anthropic said. “This new firm extends that delivery capacity further,” it added.