[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong (홍진주)] Japan’s major IT and infrastructure company Hitachi has signed a strategic partnership with Anthropic and will introduce generative AI such as Claude across all business processes for about 290,000 group employees.

On May 19 local time, Japan’s ITmedia reported that Hitachi plans to boost internal productivity while also strengthening its social-infrastructure solution, HMAX by Hitachi.

The collaboration starts with Hitachi’s internal deployment. Hitachi will position its own rollout as “Customer Zero” and reflect experience and data gained from internal operations in customer solutions. It will first expand AI use in cutting software development effort, streamlining corporate work and automating hardware maintenance and operations. Hitachi will also launch a joint programme with Anthropic to train about 100,000 employees to use AI in daily work.

The customer-facing business is focused on social infrastructure. Hitachi plans to combine Claude’s code generation and analysis capabilities with its system engineering strengths to advance system development and operations in power, transportation, manufacturing and finance. HMAX will incorporate Claude’s reasoning functions to support natural-language-based equipment management and optimisation of maintenance work using algorithms. The company said it aims to expand AI use in “mission-critical industrial sites” through the effort.

The partnership also includes cooperation in security. Hitachi’s specialised organisation, the Cyber CoE, will work with Anthropic to strengthen cyberattack detection and response systems. The plan is to expand AI beyond work automation into on-site systems that combine operations and security.

The two companies will also set up a dedicated organisation to drive the work. Hitachi will establish a global organisation, the Frontier AI Deployment Center, and run joint projects under a structure spanning North America, Europe and Asia. Initially, it will launch with a team of about 100, including Anthropic’s applied AI staff and Hitachi experts in IT, OT, products and security. The goal is to expand to 300 people later.

The partnership also aligns with a broader trend of cooperation between major Japanese IT companies and Anthropic. Anthropic announced a collaboration with NEC in April. NEC secured global partner status for the first time among Japanese companies and has rolled out Claude Code to 30,000 group employees.

Hitachi will pursue internal work innovation and expansion of external business at the same time through the partnership. With a structure that first applies AI internally to validate it and then transfers the results to customer systems, a key question will be how quickly it can increase real operating cases in social-infrastructure fields such as power, transportation, manufacturing and finance.