Chamath Palihapitiya warns PwC and Accenture against working with OpenAI and Anthropic: ‘You are letting the fox into the henhouse’

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said leading consulting firms will come to regret their partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic.

“If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I’m looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house,” Palihapitiya wrote on X.

Palihapitiya issued his warning days after OpenAI announced that it was forming a new company, OpenAI Deployment Company, “to help organizations build and deploy AI systems.” McKinsey & Company is an investor in DeployCo.

“OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them,” he wrote. “This is not a failure on their part but a failure on your part. “

PwC and Accenture have previously announced expansive partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last week, Anthropic and PwC jointly announced “an expansion of their strategic alliance,” including the establishment of “a joint Center of Excellence and a program to train and certify 30,000 PwC professionals on Claude.” On the same day, May 14, Accenture announced a partnership with OpenAI to help federal agencies deploy AI calls for the type of forward-deployed engineers that Palihapitiya seems particularly concerned about.

All of this, Palihapitiya said during a recent episode of the “All in Podcast,” is about the realization that the low end of the SaaS market is “basically finished,” thanks to generative AI. Now, the competition is about the big companies.

“At the high end of the market where all the action is, what people are finding is, ‘Hey, hold on a second, this is a lot harder than we thought,'” Palihapitiya said. “It’s not like boop, boop, boop, put in a prompt and beep, bap, boop, it all works. It’s not how it works.”

It’s why AI companies need organizations like DeployCo, Palihapitiya said, and why consulting companies should be wary of short-term partnerships.

Otherwise, as he wrote on X, they are just “adopting and accelerating the companies that want to disrupt them.”