Building an AI agent to help clients adjust to changing tax regulations sounds complex. That’s exactly why it used to take weeks and required teams to switch between multiple tools and chat windows. At KPMG, it now takes minutes.
That shift is the direct result of a global alliance the firm announced on May 19 with Anthropic, embedding Claude inside Digital Gateway — KPMG’s main platform for client work. A week earlier, rival PwC deepened its own strategic alliance with Anthropic, restructuring entire business units around the same AI. Taken together, the two deals mark a turning point: big consulting is no longer piloting Claude. It is building on top of it.
For context, Claude is a family of AI tools developed by Anthropic. Claude models, particularly from their third generation onward, have consistently ranked among the top-performing generative AI models available on the market, as per IBM.
Two firms, one bet
Every one of KPMG’s 276,000-plus employees across 138 countries will gain access to Claude. The integration goes beyond access. Claude is being embedded inside Digital Gateway — built on Microsoft Azure — where KPMG’s tax expertise, proprietary tools, and client data live together, starting with new tools for tax and legal clients.
“At KPMG, we’re innovating and redefining how work gets done. This global alliance with Anthropic reflects our shared commitment to responsible AI, prioritising security, trust, and governance as KPMG firms scale these capabilities to our clients and people around the world,” said Bill Thomas, global chairman and CEO of KPMG International.
At PwC, the ambition is similarly sweeping. The firms are establishing a joint Centre of Excellence and a programme to train and certify 30,000 PwC professionals on Claude, with plans to expand the rollout to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands. PwC is also launching a new standalone business group — the Office of the CFO — built entirely on Claude, focused on finance transformation in regulated industries.
“The conversation around AI has shifted from possibility to execution. Clients are looking for ways to apply AI that are secure, responsible, and capable of delivering measurable outcomes in complex business environments,” said Paul Griggs, US senior partner and CEO of PwC.
What Claude is actually doing
The deals are not aspirational. Both firms have Claude running in production across client work today.
At PwC, insurance underwriting that previously took ten weeks now takes ten days. Cybersecurity incident response has been compressed from hours to minutes. A stalled HR transformation programme was turned around with a working prototype in one week and a full application in under two months, now running thousands of daily transactions. Across these deployments, clients have reported delivery improvements of up to 70%.
“We’re excited to put Claude in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people across PwC’s workforce. Insurance underwriting that took 10 weeks now takes 10 days. Security work that took hours now takes minutes,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic.
At KPMG, cybersecurity is a key focus alongside tax and legal. “Our clients depend on us where accuracy, judgment, and knowledge matter most,” said Tim Walsh, chair and CEO of KPMG US.
KPMG is also named a preferred partner for Anthropic’s private equity work, with a new offering called KPMG Blaze, embedding Claude Code to help PE portfolio companies modernise legacy IT systems and ship AI-enabled technology faster.
OpenAI is chasing the same market
Anthropic is not alone in recognising that consulting firms are the fastest route to enterprise scale. In February, OpenAI announced its own partnerships — called Frontier Alliances — with McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini, enlisting them to sell and implement its Frontier AI agent platform for enterprise clients.
BCG and McKinsey are positioned primarily as strategy partners, helping leadership teams figure out where and how to deploy agents. Accenture and Capgemini take a more hands-on systems integration role, handling data architecture, cloud infrastructure, and the work of connecting Frontier to the systems enterprises actually run on.
The structure of Anthropic’s alliances, however, runs deeper. PwC and KPMG are not just reselling Claude — they are retraining their workforces around it, co-developing new products, and restructuring business units to run on it. Fortune noted that Anthropic had already made substantial inroads in the enterprise market with Claude Code and Claude Cowork before OpenAI moved to counter with its own consulting push. The race for the enterprise is now also a race for the firms that serve it.
