Anthropic will invest $100 million to train 10,000 engineers to lead corporate AI adoption on the ground.

On Oct. 6, IT outlet TechRadar reported that Anthropic launched the Claude Frontier Academy and plans to develop 10,000 Frontier Deployment Engineers (FDE) by the end of 2027. They are tasked with identifying internal AI use cases at companies and handling everything from security reviews to system implementation and actual deployment.

Participants will be chosen by companies from among their own engineers. Training begins with an in-person course alongside Anthropic engineers and includes projects that simulate real corporate environments, covering use-case selection, security review, deployment and handover. Those who pass the assessment enter a 12-week residency and lead an actual Claude project within their organization. Those who pass the final assessment will receive FDE qualifications. The first graduates are expected in early 2027.

The first cohort will include engineers from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk. The program is already running in San Francisco, New York and London.

Through its existing Claude Partner Network, Anthropic has issued more than 175,000 Claude certifications to experts spanning 46,000 companies. The new academy focuses on building key personnel who will deploy and operate AI in real corporate systems beyond online certification.

Rival OpenAI also runs an engineering organization that is dispatched directly to customers, but Anthropic differs in that it trains engineers at consultancies and customer companies rather than expanding its own staff. The strategy is that if partners build capabilities to deploy Claude on their own, Anthropic can also broaden its touchpoints with more corporate customers.