GoKawiilEditor's note: The following article is a commentary on some of the top trends in technology and its broader impact.
The technology to disrupt enterprise software already exists. What's been missing is the forcing function.
A potential tie-up between artificial intelligence and private equity could be exactly that.
The Information reported Wednesday that Anthropic is in talks with firms, including Blackstone , to form a joint venture, using a Palantir -style model to sell consulting services that would integrate Claude into their portfolio companies.
The deal makes sense for Anthropic, which just lost its Pentagon distribution channel. But private equity firms risk cannibalizing their own businesses and accelerating the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, shakeout that's already underway.
For a firm like Blackstone, the math is more forgiving. Its portfolio spans manufacturing, healthcare, real estate, financial services, and infrastructure.
If Claude can cut costs across hundreds of companies in those industries, Blackstone has zero reason to hesitate. But many of the licenses those companies cancel may belong to software companies owned by a different set of PE firms, ones whose entire business depends on recurring software revenue holding up.
Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity Partners both call themselves one of the largest software-focused asset managers. Their revenue is now in the crosshairs. Claude Code can approximate what many horizontal SaaS tools do: Project management, basic customer relationship management, analytics dashboards and even portions of human resources and finance workflows.
When a Blackstone-owned manufacturer, for example, uses Claude to build a custom internal tool instead of renewing its Smartsheet license, Blackstone saves money while the software company, which Blackstone also happens to own, loses a customer.
But they'll make that trade every time because PE optimizes for the fund as a whole, not a single at-risk software company.
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