Accenture struck a deal with Anthropic, 8 days after saying it would partner with OpenAI

• Consulting firm Accenture and AI darling Anthropic have announced an expansion of their partnership.
• Accenture says it will use Anthropic's Claude to serve both staff and clients.
• Accenture announced a similar deal with OpenAI just over a week ago.

Accenture has announced an expansion of its partnership with Anthropic, its second deal with a leading AI developer in the past eight days.

The deal includes a suite of new solutions and offerings that will help Accenture's clients "accelerate the shift from experimenting with AI to using it as a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise," said Julie Sweet, Accenture's CEO.

The two companies said they would form the "Accenture Anthropic Business Group," which will train around 30,000 employees in delivering Claude-powered solutions.

Tens of thousands of developers at Accenture will also receive access to Claude Code as part of the deal, and Accenture and Anthropic will launch an offering for chief information officers to measure the value of AI solutions and scale them.

"AI is changing how almost everyone works, and enterprises need both cutting-edge AI and trusted expertise to deploy it at scale," said Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic.

He added that the rollout of Claude Code to Accenture employees was the company's largest ever deployment.

Accenture announced a similar deal with OpenAI earlier this month, saying it would provide tens of thousands of its employees with ChatGPT Enterprise to use across consulting, operations, and delivery work.

Accenture and OpenAI also announced plans to launch a "flagship AI client program," which the firms said will help clients adopt OpenAI products across their workflows.

"Accenture invests in strategic partnerships with the best across the ecosystem, co-developing solutions and going to market together," Lan Guan, chief AI & Data officer at Accenture, told Business Insider.

"The addition of Anthropic as a strategic partner is about expanding client choice, meeting client demand, and accelerating innovation," Guan said.

The professional services industry stands out as one of the industries most exposed to AI-driven transformation. Top firms are racing to prove they can deploy AI effectively in-house and guide clients to do the same.

For AI developers, global consulting firms offer access to the back-end systems of some of the world's most valuable companies.

The Big Four firm Deloitte, for example, has a partnership with Anthropic, providing its global workforce of 470,000 with Claude-powered solutions. Deloitte is also developing AI agents in partnership with Nvidia. It counts Boeing, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, and the US federal government among its clients.

The top consulting firms have a similar suite of partnerships with companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Anthropic.

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