Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, said on Friday that it will invest $100 million to train 10,000 engineers who help businesses move A.I. projects out of the pilot stage and into production.
The new program, Claude Frontier Academy, is built around a role the industry calls the forward-deployed engineer — F.D.E. for short. Popularized by Palantir, forward-deployed engineers work inside a customer’s operation, adapting technology to its systems, data and workflows. They help decide what to build, connect it to existing technology and make sure employees can actually use it.
The first cohorts include engineers from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Novo Nordisk and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Anthropic aims to train 10,000 F.D.E.s by the end of 2027.
Training begins with a multi-day, in-person program led by Anthropic engineers and instructors, in which participants work through a simulated company deployment, from choosing a use case to a security review and handover. Those who pass move into a 12-week residency, leading a real Claude project at their own organization. The first engineers certified under the program are expected in early 2027.
The academy extends a relationship Anthropic has been building with the consulting world. In December 2025, Accenture created the Anthropic Business Group and committed to train roughly 30,000 of its professionals on Claude, including what the firm calls its “reinvention deployed engineers.” Last month, Accenture announced a partnership with Google Cloud to send 1,000 engineers to work with major clients on deploying A.I. agents.
Consulting firms have embedded teams inside client organizations for decades. What has changed is the work itself: deploying A.I. demands engineers who can also grasp how a client’s business runs, and that combination is suddenly scarce.
The hiring numbers show the scramble. F.D.E. openings rose to 1,404 across five major consulting firms in the year ended in May, according to an analysis by the research firm Draup — even as overall job postings across seven firms fell about 24 percent year over year.