Anthropic just partnered with KPMG to put Claude in front of every CFO
Cloudflare CEO tells public which employee to fire first because of AI. OpenAI partnered with PwC to build AI CFO agents and KPMG gave Claude to its employees. Tech giants are going public.
Anthropic just partnered with KPMG to put Claude in the hands of every person the CFO answers to.
The audit partner who signs off your financials.
The tax advisor who structures your year-end.
The M&A team running diligence on your next deal.
The internal audit consultant testing your SOX controls.
KPMG put it plainly on their own alliance page.
"Our alliance with Anthropic engineers AI directly into the platforms, controls, and workflows where professional judgment matters most."
That is the work the CFO has been paying KPMG to do for 30 years. It just got an AI layer the CFO does not have. It means the tax advisor reviews your deal structure with Claude before the meeting.
It means the M&A diligence team will read your last 12 months of board reporting through Claude before they sit down with you.
KPMG works in industries where accuracy, accountability, and trust aren’t optional, and they’re applying the same standard to AI. They’re rolling Claude out to 276,000 people across the business, and using it for client work in tax and private equity. They’re also bringing it into cybersecurity, where it helps find and fix vulnerabilities. That’s what a firm-wide commitment to AI looks like, and we’re proud to be the partner they chose.
How are you using Claude as a CFO?
It is the question the room will ask you.
Cloudflare CEO tells public which employee to fire first
After firing 20% of his employees because of AI, Cloudflare's CEO told the public which employees you should fire first. He sorted his workforce into 3 groups.
Builders
Sellers
Measurers
Then he cut the measurers first.
Measurers, in his words, are middle management, finance, legal, internal audit, and operations. The people who count and check and document the work instead of making it or selling it.
Every CFO reading this just felt something.
Because for the last 30 years, that is exactly how finance has been filed inside the org chart. Overhead. Back office. A measurer.
Matthew Prince is half right.
The part of finance that just measures is in serious trouble. AI doesn't sleep and doesn't need a controller to chase variance explanations across 12 entities. The part Prince is wrong about is treating finance as one undifferentiated bucket.
A finance team that only measures is overhead. A finance team that builds the operating system the company runs on is infrastructure.
There is a difference between a controller running a 12-day close and a CFO who built the data model that lets the CEO see the next quarter before it happens.
Both technically work in finance.
Only one of them is a measurer.
The CFOs who survive the next 36 months are not the ones defending the function. They are the ones rebuilding it from the inside.
Anthropic’s CFO just published the playbook for what comes next
Krishna Rao runs the finance function at Anthropic, a company that scaled from $9 billion to over $30 billion in annualized revenue in roughly four months.
Krishna Rao is the CFO who runs the finance function behind that number.
His team has built 150 Claude skills.
Statutory financial statements for all Anthropic legal entities are produced through Claude.
The monthly financial review is 90 to 95% ready before a human edits it.
Weekly compute utilization reports that used to take hours now take 30 minutes.
The biggest internal user of Claude inside the finance team is the head of tax.
Not the youngest controller or the FP&A director. But the head of tax.
The senior people, the heads of function, the people with the most institutional knowledge, are the heaviest users. Because they are the ones writing the skills.
Anthropic’s CFO uses Claude for the monthly financial review. I built MFR Skill.md every CFO can install it.
Tech giants are going public
For 10 years, the operating advice for every private company over $500M was the same. Stay private. Avoid the public markets.
That advice just expired.
Cerebras went public this month. Priced at $185. Range raised twice. Stock opened at $320. Settled around $230. Market cap: $50 to $60 billion.
Bill Gurley said the line every CFO needs to read.
“The public markets may be shifting back. A lot of the companies in our portfolios are now thinking about going public at a billion or three billion or five billion. We had this period of a decade where Andreessen was really pushing stay private forever and I see the pendulum swinging back.”
Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and the rest of the private giants absorbed all the value creation. Public investors never got to participate.
The pendulum is swinging the other way.
If you are a CFO at a private company in the $1 billion to $5 billion range, your board is already having the conversation. The honest question is not whether to IPO. The honest question is whether your finance function can survive one.
Public market scrutiny is a different animal.
Quarterly filings on a schedule that does not care how complicated your business got last quarter. Audit committees that want every control documented. Investor relations that expects answers within 24 hours of any market move.
The CFO who has been automating the close and building real-time reporting for the last twelve months is ready. The CFO running monthly closes in Excel is not.
The window is open. The CFO whose function is ready walks through it. The CFO whose function is not gets asked to step aside before the S-1 gets filed.
The Bottom Line
For 30 years, the value of the CFO seat came from being the most informed person in the room. The CFO ran the numbers. The CFO controlled the systems. Information asymmetry was the moat.
This week, every part of that moat got priced to zero.
KPMG put Claude in the hands of every external advisor. The CFO is no longer the most informed person at the table.
Cloudflare’s CEO told the public market that the measurement work inside the function is the first thing AI cuts. The market rewarded him for saying it.
Anthropic’s CFO published what the alternative looks like. A function where senior people write skills, the close is 95% automatic, and the head of tax is the heaviest internal AI user.
The IPO window reopening is the test. Public markets sort the functions that built the architecture from the ones that did not.
The CFO seat is being re-priced from informational expert to architectural author. The CFO who controlled the data is being replaced by the CFO who builds the system the data flows through.
Most CFOs reading this got their seat under the old pricing.
The technical accounting, the model fluency, and the relationships with auditors and bankers. Those skills are still necessary. They are no longer sufficient.
Three questions worth sitting with this weekend.
What part of your seat’s value today is information the room no longer needs you for?
What part of your seat’s value comes from systems your team built that the room cannot get anywhere else?
Which number is bigger?
The CFO who can answer those three questions honestly already knows what the next 12 months have to look like.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
If you’re building an AI-powered CFO tech startup, I’d love to hear more and explore if it’s a fit for our investment portfolio.
I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
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You ask some interesting questions which I think only the future can answer so let's see. . . The leap I am struggling to make with you is that a consultant with Claude is still a consultant with Claude. Getting Claude does not suddenly get you (the consultant) access to your client's proprietary internal data let alone a non-client's data. Every client serving project I ever worked on as a consultant always came with a tightly scoped data request vs. an open to all fishing expedition.
I would also put my money on most decent CFO's being in Krishna Rao's camp or figuring out how to be in his camp when it comes to the use of Claude etc. which I think approximates to your 2nd question to ponder over the weekend.
As a follow on I wonder now many CFO's, Audit Committees and Boards will actually tighten access to their data because of Claude and its ilk? If not because of Claude then probably because they may not trust their data in the hands of their auditor/external advisor in any event: https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/kpmg-audit-leaks-scandal-everything-you-need-to-know-20260606-p604i5.
The referenced article is how KPMG in Australia have been behaving with the confidential information of its clients' data and this is even without Claude as an accessory before, during or after the fact. I imagine this sort of behaviour is not restricted to Australia either.