Welcome back to The One-Pager.
I’m evolving this a bit – trying to make it even more skimmable.
One big headline explained simply, a handful of links, and that’s it. I'll keep my unsolicited commentary to a minimum. This industry moves so darn fast, so I'm just keeping up as well.
I hope you find something helpful or interesting, and then get on with your day.
One Big Headline
Anthropic (company behind Claude) just partnered with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman to create a $1.5 billion "AI services company." Apollo, General Atlantic, Sequoia, and others also backed it. Seems like it doesn’t have a name yet.
The vision is to target the middle-market (at least to start), where there's a real interest in AI but not enough in-house resources to deploy things correctly, so the venture will send in "applied AI engineers" to help run the process.
Seems the only thing AI can't replace is the Sunday - Thursday traveling consultant.
The first companies in line are portfolio companies owned by the PE firms backing the deal. So between Blackstone, Apollo, General Atlantic, Leonard Green, and the others involved, that’s hundreds of companies.
Jamie Dimon and Dario Amodei were all at the launch event (shockingly, it was invite only).
The day after, Anthropic also released 10 pre-built financial agent templates for things like KYC reviews, monthly close, pitch book generation, and valuation review -- plus a Moody’s data integration covering 600 million+ companies -- hard to say what the future holds, but the shift is constant and continual.
Helpful to check out:
- ChatGPT for Excel is now available on all plans – Previously limited to Business and Enterprise users, ChatGPT’s Excel add-in is now open to Plus and Pro subscribers too, powered by the new GPT-5.5 model. OpenAI says 52.5% fewer hallucinations on finance-related prompts compared to the prior version.
- Copilot in Excel added Plan Mode, Python, and local file support – Plan Mode lets you see Copilot’s step-by-step reasoning before it edits your workbook. Python is now available directly inside the editing experience. And it finally works on files saved locally, not just OneDrive or SharePoint.
- Anthropic doubled Claude’s usage limits – Announced alongside a compute deal with SpaceX (220,000+ GPUs). Rate limits doubled for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. Peak-hours throttling removed for Pro and Max.
- OpenAI is preparing for an IPO – Revenue went from ~$200M in 2022 to $10B+ in 2025. The most recent funding round valued the company at $852 billion. Enterprise revenue is now over 40% of total.
- Claude add-ins are now live for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word – Outlook is next. Separately, Claude’s M365 Connector already gives read-only access to your Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams data across all plans including free.
That's it for this one. See you next time.
—Chris