Anthropic commits $100 million to train 10,000 engineers to deploy Claude

It's a training initiative aimed at what Anthropic calls one of the most pressing issues in putting AI to work: talent.

Anthropic argues that every company is racing to bring AI in, but the people who can make it work inside a real business have become the hardest to find. Inside the companies it works with, it says, a small group of deeply skilled people drives an outsized share of what AI delivers.

The Academy is built on Anthropic's own experience deploying Claude inside large enterprises and the consulting firms that serve them. Anthropic calls it the first program of its kind from an AI company, as Unite.AI also notes. Corfield said no AI company has invested in developing that talent inside its customers and partners at this depth.

"A small team of high-agency people with the right skills, access to Claude, and a deep understanding of how their business runs can transform an entire company," said Steve Corfield, Anthropic's global head of business development and partnerships. "Claude Frontier Academy trains people the way our own engineers learn, and we want those who graduate to set the standard for how AI gets built inside a business."

The Academy's first program is the Frontier Deployed Engineer Residency, and it borrows from medical training. Doctors learn from practicing physicians, train on real cases and are assessed before they practice alone. The residency follows the same pattern, according to Anthropic.

The steps:

1. In-person start: a multi-day program with Anthropic engineers and licensed instructors.
2. Simulated deployment: engineers work through a mock enterprise project, from choosing the right use case through security review to handover.
3. Graded practical: a test on a brand-new scenario. Passing earns the Claude Resident Engineer badge.
4. 12-week residency: engineers lead a real Claude project at their own organization, supported by Anthropic engineers and learning from their cohort.
5. Final assessment: those who pass earn the Claude Frontier Deployed Engineer badge. Anthropic expects the first in early 2027.

The goal, Anthropic says, is agentic systems that change how a business runs, from faster, redesigned processes to new products and services.

In real life Picture a bank or a drug company picking its best engineer, sending them through the program, and having them come back to lead one specific Claude project, like automating a slow internal process, with Anthropic's engineers on call.

The program is aimed at hands-on software engineers with:

• Strong fundamentals
• A track record of building with large language models
• Experience helping others adopt AI
• A habit of tackling their business's most important problems

Prior experience building AI agents isn't required. Companies nominate their strongest engineers, and each one arrives with a named Claude project to lead when they return. Unite.AI describes the participants as each being nominated with a specific Claude project to lead once back at their organization.

Participation is by nomination only, and organizations can ask their Anthropic account team or Partner Account Manager whether they qualify.

The first cohorts include engineers from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk, among others. They're running now in San Francisco, New York and London.

Several of them explained why they joined:

• Accenture said the residency tests judgment through a simulated enterprise deployment, not technical skills in isolation, which matches how it sees the role.
• Capgemini said clients care less about certification counts and more about knowing firsthand how to solve real problems.
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia said its teams have produced up to 3x more code changes in the past year using AI tools, and the residency takes them deeper.
• McKinsey said the residency sets the bar for how its technologists apply Claude for clients.
• Novo Nordisk said it already uses Claude Science in its research workflows, Anthropic's models in software development and "lab in the loop" research in drug discovery, with Anthropic engineers working alongside its scientists. It wants its engineers to get the same hands-on training behind Anthropic's most successful deployments, to bring new medicines to patients faster.

The big picture: the Academy is the latest step in Anthropic's push to get Claude used inside large companies.

Back in March, Anthropic committed an initial $100 million to the Claude Partner Network, a program for consulting and services firms that help enterprises adopt Claude. Anthropic said then that these partners help customers find where Claude adds the most value, and handle deployment requirements, compliance and change management inside large organizations.

That earlier commitment covered several things, according to Anthropic's March announcement:

• Money for partners: a significant share went directly to partners for training, sales enablement, market development and joint marketing.
• More Anthropic staff: the company said it was scaling its partner-facing team fivefold, adding Applied AI engineers for live customer deals and technical architects for complex projects.
• Certification: it introduced its first technical exam, Claude Certified Architect, Foundations, for solution architects building production apps with Claude.
• A directory: qualified partners are listed in a Services Partner Directory so enterprise buyers can find firms with Claude experience.

Partners in that network also got access to a Partner Portal with Anthropic Academy training materials and the sales playbooks used by Anthropic's own team, and Anthropic said it planned more certifications for sellers, architects and developers later in the year.

"Our partners are instrumental in getting enterprises from proof of concept to production with Claude, and we're making sure they have everything they need to do it," Corfield said at the time.

Anthropic also noted in March that Claude is the only frontier AI model available on all three leading cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft.

Anthropic says the Academy builds on that network. Professionals across 46,000 firms have earned more than 175,000 Claude certifications, and nearly 4,000 people have completed Basecamp, an immersive program that teaches the same curriculum Anthropic's own Applied AI teams learn when they join.

"Claude Frontier Academy is for the people who will lead the work," Anthropic says, calling the 10,000-engineer goal "the first step of many."

The catch: this is a program for engineers nominated by companies Anthropic already works with, not an open course anyone can sign up for.

For more on Anthropic, see our Anthropic topic page.

• If you're an engineer at a big company: your employer may be able to nominate you, and prior AI agent experience isn't required.
• If you run a company using Claude: ask your Anthropic account team about eligibility.
• If you're watching AI jobs: "Frontier Deployed Engineer" is a new title worth knowing, built around getting AI into production, not just testing it.