Wealth management platform Orion has expanded its tie-up with Anthropic, moving to absorb the AI company's newly minted financial services plug-ins into its adviser ecosystem.
The move lands alongside Anthropic's wider enterprise agents push - the San Francisco outfit's most assertive attempt yet to wire Claude into workplace operations across finance, HR, and design.
Under the new program, pre-built agents cover common knowledge-work tasks, with firms able to customise each to their own standards and data flows.
For Orion, it's not a standing start - the Omaha-based wealthtech firm has had Anthropic baked into its artificial intelligence build-out for some time, and the expanded arrangement hands it first-mover access to whatever Claude capabilities the company pushes out next.
Who Orion is
Orion is no boutique.
It administers US$5.8 trillion in assets under administration and US$133 billion in wealth management infrastructure, backs more than 8 million technology accounts, and counts 17 of the top 20 Barron's RIA firms among its clients.
The firm has been acquisitive.
In January 2025 it snapped up Summit Wealth Systems - founded by Reed Colley, who also founded Black Diamond and now heads Orion Advisor Technology as president.
Colley has made no secret of his view that AI is table stakes, telling practitioners publicly that sitting on the sidelines is not an option.
In January 2026, Edelman Financial Engines - a $308 billion AUM registered investment adviser - tore up eight years with rival Envestnet and shifted its entire tech stack to Orion.
In this market, that's a serious scalp.
Orion's Denali AI - an enterprise intelligence layer designed to stitch together every system and workflow across the suite - came out of beta last year and is pencilled in for full deployment through 2026.
The Anthropic modules slot directly into that architecture.
Who Anthropic is
Anthropic is the world's second-largest AI company by valuation, trailing only OpenAI, and remains privately held.
On 12 February it closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion post-money valuation - more than double the $183 billion it commanded at its Series F in September 2025.
Singapore's GIC and Coatue led the raise alongside Microsoft and Nvidia.
Annualised revenue now sits at $14 billion, having grown north of 10x each year for the past three years, with enterprise accounts driving roughly 80% of that top line and eight of the Fortune 10 among its Claude customers.
That growth curve has rattled equity markets, though Tuesday offered a partial reprieve.
Since Anthropic first previewed Claude Cowork on 30 January, software stocks have haemorrhaged around $2 trillion in market cap from their peak.
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF fell nearly 5% on Monday, then clawed back nearly 2% intraday on Tuesday after Anthropic outlined an integration model built to complement existing vendors rather than cannibalise them.
Wedbush Securities called the earlier selloff "overblown," arguing AI models cannot rip out workflows deeply embedded in software infrastructure.
Anthropic's head of product for enterprise, Scott White, was equally measured: "We view ourselves as a platform, not a product trying to own every workflow."
Competition
In wealthtech, Orion's main challengers are Envestnet - sitting on roughly $6.5 trillion in AUM and committed to a $1 billion five-year product overhaul - plus SS&C Black Diamond, Addepar, and Advyzon.
None has announced anything resembling a direct tie-up with a frontier model provider.
They are grafting AI capabilities onto existing products through in-house builds or off-the-shelf integrations - serviceable, but a different proposition to co-developing with the underlying model company itself.
Worth noting is what Anthropic assembled the financial services plug-ins with: FactSet, S&P Global, and LSEG on the data and research side, and Apollo for private equity tooling.
These are the institutional-grade sources RIAs already depend on, giving the tools a credibility advantage that any wealthtech vendor building its own AI layer from scratch would struggle to close quickly.
On the supply side, Anthropic's primary competition is OpenAI, which earlier this month launched its Frontier system and locked in multiyear deals with four major consulting firms - a channel-led approach that contrasts sharply with Anthropic's direct vertical push.
As the company's head of Americas, Kate Jensen, put it on Tuesday: "2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise, but the hype turned out to be mostly premature. It wasn't a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach."
In practice
The edge Orion picks up here is sequencing and specificity.
Its Anthropic plug-ins are purpose-built for portfolio analysis, equity research, and private equity modelling - not generic AI bolted onto a dashboard.
Orion also gets to shape how they land inside its own system before hitting the wider market.
Whether that carves out a durable wedge over Envestnet and Black Diamond comes down to shipping speed - the tools are barely 24 hours old and the hard integration work lies ahead.
But Orion has the AUM footprint, the data infrastructure, and now the AI pipeline to make a credible push.
"Orion is applying AI in a way that's practical, secure, and designed for the realities of an adviser's day," Orion Advisor Technology President Reed Colley said.
