The fight between Anthropic and OpenAI just moved into a new room - enterprise consulting.
Anthropic's new joint venture, the one backed by Blackstone and Wall Street's biggest alternative asset managers, just made its first acquisition. The target was Fractional AI, a San Francisco consulting firm that had been working with OpenAI for the last 11 months.
Fractional AI is ending that OpenAI partnership as part of the deal, and terms were not disclosed.
Anthropic's joint venture is still unnamed, but what is behind it is not. The list of backers includes Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, Leonard Green & Partners, GIC, and Sequoia Capital.
Together, they are committing $1.5 billion to push Claude into midsize companies. Selling AI to enterprises is harder than selling to developers, because companies need someone to implement the tech, train staff, and wire Claude into the systems they already run.
Fractional AI does exactly that work. OpenAI launched a near-identical joint venture earlier this month, which means the two AI giants are now competing for the same enterprise budgets with the same playbook.
The bet is that the global consulting market - long dominated by firms like McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture - gets reshaped by AI labs willing to bundle their models with the deployment work.
Want to know which AI bets investors are actually making? Market Briefs breaks it down in five minutes a day - and a free investing masterclass comes with the signup.
Fractional AI was founded about two years ago by three former LiveRamp colleagues: Chris Taylor, Eddie Siegel, and Travis May. The firm has already worked with private-equity-backed businesses, including the software provider Datasite.
Taylor and Siegel previously helped launch a data integration platform that Samba TV bought in 2019, while May went on to found the healthcare data company Datavant.
In short, this is a team that knows how to sell AI services into private equity portfolios. That is exactly the customer base Anthropic's new venture wants.
Anthropic is on pace for its first operating profit in Q2 2026. The company projects $10.9 billion in revenue for the June quarter, up 130% from $4.8 billion in Q1, with operating income of about $559 million.
Coding tools are driving the growth, and the unit economics are getting better. In Q1, Anthropic spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue, and that ratio is expected to fall to 56 cents this quarter.
Anthropic flagged it may not stay profitable for the full year because of planned infrastructure spending. That is a separate fight - the one over how many AI data centers actually get built.
Today, Anthropic just bought itself a sales force.
If you want this kind of read on the AI wars every weekday, sign up for Market Briefs - you also get a 45-minute investing course as a bonus.
