Anthropic Academy is the free course platform published by Anthropic, the company behind Claude. It now goes by the name Claude Academy and lives at academy.claude.com. Twenty-nine courses are online as of November 2026, from a first conversation with Claude to building agents on the API. Access is free, and every course ends with a quiz that grants a certificate of completion.
The Claude certification follows different rules. Anthropic launched four proctored, paid exams open only to organisations in its partner network. Two products carry almost the same name and speak to different audiences. A manager looking to train their teams is better off telling them apart before drawing up a plan.
What exactly is Anthropic Academy?
Anthropic Academy is a catalogue of self-paced online courses produced by the model's own vendor. Each course strings together short lessons, often with a video, and closes with a final quiz. A Claude account saves your progress, and no paid subscription is required to follow the content. A handful of hands-on exercises assume an API key or a paid plan, which stays a minority of the catalogue.
Two limits are worth stating straight away. The courses are published in English, with no French version at the time of writing. And the certificate handed out at the end attests to attendance, with no proctored exam and no identity check. On a LinkedIn profile, it reads as proof of curiosity.
What do the twenty-nine free courses cover?
The catalogue reads as five tracks. Fundamentals take the largest share, built around the AI Fluency framework and a course devoted to what a model can and cannot actually do. Then come the platform and the API, Claude Code, the products such as Cowork and Tag, and the MCP protocol that wires Claude into your tools.
- Claude 101, fourteen lessons for a business user. Projects, artifacts, skills, connectors, enterprise search. This is where a non-technical team starts.
- Deploying Claude Enterprise, fifteen lessons built around five rollout decisions. Structure, access, governance, spend, visibility. The most useful course for a leadership team.
- Claude Code 101, thirteen lessons on the command-line tool, followed by an advanced course and two more on skills and subagents.
- Building with the Claude API, seventy-five lessons. The longest track in the catalogue, with its Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud variants.
- Introduction to MCP, eleven lessons, followed by an advanced course. This is the piece that connects Claude to your CRM or your ticketing tool.
Is the Claude certification open to everyone?
No, and that is the point most articles leave out. In July 2026 Anthropic announced four role-based certifications. They are proctored, delivered by Pearson online or in a test centre, and come with a verifiable digital badge. Access is limited to people working at an organisation in the Claude Partner Network, registering with a company email address on a recognised domain. A personal address is rejected.
The format is identical across the four exams, according to the certification FAQ checked in November 2026. Two hours of exam time, multiple-choice and scenario questions, and a minimum score of 720 on a scale running from 100 to 1,000. The badge stays valid for twelve months. A failed attempt can be retaken after fourteen days, then thirty, then ninety, up to four attempts a year and at full price every time.
For a customer company the consequence is simple. Your teams can take every free course, and they cannot sit the exam. The certification mainly qualifies the providers who deploy Claude for their clients, and the number of certified practitioners weighs on a partner's standing inside the network.
What Anthropic's courses leave out
The courses teach the product, and they teach it well. They say nothing about your context. Not your processes, not your business rules, and not the reason a support team digs in while the sales team moves ahead on its own. Across around a hundred engagements run by Tandem with more than 50 companies, that gap is exactly where a completed course turns into real adoption, or fails to.
I laid out five conditions for success in my edition on AI ROI. Document the context, experiment continuously, measure what matters, keep an accessible tech stack. The fifth one is the most often forgotten, sustaining training over time. Tools shift every quarter. A single session in January does not hold for six months.
In that video I describe the role missing from most organisations. Understanding the business need, mapping processes, prototyping, training colleagues, steering value. Anthropic's courses cover the third skill and part of the first. The other four get built on the ground, with your data and your teams.
The path I recommend to a team
The right sequence starts with the free catalogue and stops before looking there for what it does not hold. Four steps are enough to frame the first few weeks.
- Two courses for everyone. Claude 101 and the AI Fluency framework, around six hours in total. The goal is a shared vocabulary and an accurate sense of what a model can do.
- One course for the leadership team. The enterprise rollout track, which settles access, governance and spend decisions before opening the gates.
- An internal workshop on your real cases. Two hours on your own documents and your own processes, run by whoever on the team is furthest ahead.
- A monthly ritual. One hour where everyone shows what they found. That is what keeps skills growing over time.
For the hands-on step, I published a ten-step memo on LinkedIn in May 2026. It runs from installing the app to the first scheduled task, by way of the three context files that replace most prompts. We use it as is in workshops.
That mechanism is detailed in our guide to mastering Claude in 10 steps. For the organisational side, the full path is described in our article on Claude training for teams, and Tandem runs these sessions as part of its Claude training offer.
One last point argues for putting this on paper. Since February 2025 the European AI regulation has asked companies deploying these systems to build AI literacy among their staff. Supervision by national authorities started in August 2026. Anthropic's free courses are a valid building block here, provided you keep a record of who took what. The detail of the AI Act obligations is in our dedicated article.
Should you rely on Anthropic Academy to train your teams?
Yes for the fundamentals, as long as English is acceptable. Twenty-nine free courses produced by the model's own vendor, with videos and quizzes, hold up well against most of the paid training sold on the market. The enterprise rollout course is a genuine surprise for a leadership team.
No for everything else. The certification stays closed to customer companies, and no generic catalogue replaces a workshop on your own documents. The rule we apply at Tandem fits in one sentence. Free courses give you the vocabulary, the field gives you the results. Start with the first, budget for the second.
