Anthropic is setting up a consultancy for Europe together with Hg, the London private equity firm. The Financial Times reported it on October 23 and City A.M. picked it up the same day. The firm is expected to launch by the end of the year, with offices in London and Berlin. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment; Hg declined.
The target group is narrowly drawn: B2B software companies and businesses with large white-collar workforces. Anthropic puts its own AI consultants and engineers inside those companies. The funding runs on two tracks—Anthropic off its own balance sheet, Hg through the funds it manages.
Three reasons, and all of them are about money
According to the report, the consultancy is meant to open new revenue streams for Anthropic, build momentum for the planned IPO, and offset some of its heavy data centre costs. That third reason reads differently next to the leaked draft of the IPO disclosure, which puts a net loss above $80bn for the first half of 2026 in the papers, most of it from accounting charges.
The market reaction arrived fast and did not hit Anthropic. Accenture, listed in New York, was down more than four per cent on Friday afternoon.
Who is actually under attack here
The list of people affected writes itself: Accenture and the Big Four, so Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC. These firms make their money walking companies through new technology, and they are spending millions to keep up on AI. When the model vendor sells that guidance itself, a layer disappears.
Anthropic has done this before. In February it released a tool for legal work, and shares in Europe’s largest data, publishing and legal software groups slid in the weeks that followed.
A consultancy is the opposite of a model business
Software scales, consulting does not. Every additional client needs additional people, and those people have to be recruited, paid and kept—in a market where Anthropic is itself one of the hardest employers to outbid. A company with that compute bill building a headcount-heavy services business is not an obvious move.
The partner explains a lot of it. Hg specialises in B2B software and already holds exactly the kind of companies that would be clients. So this is less a consultancy competing on the open market than a way to get Claude into companies where an investor is already holding the door. And Berlin as the second office next to London says the target is not the British market but the European one, with everything the AI Act generates in advisory work.
One caveat stands. All of this rests on a report with unnamed sources. Anthropic did not answer, Hg declined. Nothing is confirmed yet.