Anthropic says it will spend $100 million on a new training program, Claude Frontier Academy, with the goal of producing 10,000 Frontier Deployed Engineers by the end of 2027. The first cohorts draw on Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk, according to the announcement. The company describes the academy as the first of its kind from an AI company.
The opening program is the Frontier Deployed Engineer Residency, which Anthropic says is modeled on medical training: supervised practice, real cases and formal assessment. Participants begin with several days of in-person work alongside Anthropic engineers and licensed instructors, then complete a simulated enterprise deployment covering a use case, a security review and a handover. A graded practical on a fresh scenario closes that initial phase, and those who pass receive a Claude Resident Engineer badge.
The residency itself runs 12 weeks, during which each engineer leads a real Claude project inside their own organization with support from Anthropic staff and cohort peers. A second assessment follows at the end of those 12 weeks, and passing it earns the Claude Frontier Deployed Engineer badge. Anthropic expects the first FDE badges in early 2027.
Anthropic says cohorts are already under way in San Francisco, New York and London, and participation is by nomination only. Anthropic is aiming at hands-on software engineers with strong fundamentals, and applicants are expected to show a record of building with large language models and helping colleagues adopt AI. Each nominee arrives with a named Claude project to lead when they return to work, and prior experience building AI agents is not required.
The academy grew out of Anthropic's own enterprise deployment work and builds on its Claude Partner Network, the company says. Its Basecamp teaches the same curriculum used in Anthropic's Applied AI onboarding, and the company says that program has recorded nearly 4,000 completions. Training 10,000 FDEs is described as the first step of many.
Anthropic has not disclosed a price or fee for the academy, nor an application deadline, and it has not stated a total program length beyond the 12-week residency. The launch follows the company's September announcement of an expanded compute collaboration with Amazon, which included a commitment of more than $100 billion to AWS over the next decade and up to 5 gigawatts of compute for Claude.
The company has been widening access to Claude in other ways this year, including rupee pricing for its plans in India starting at ₹2,000 a month, a market it has called its second largest after the United States. Not every large customer has moved in the same direction: Microsoft revoked internal Claude Code licenses and directed its engineers to GitHub Copilot, with its Experiences + Devices division required to stop using Claude Code by June 30.
Steve Corfield, Anthropic's Global Head of Business Development and Partnerships, said the company wants graduates to shape how AI is built inside businesses, adding that "No AI company has invested in developing that talent inside its customers and partners at this depth."
