Anthropic to invest $100 million to train AI engineer talent - CNBC
Oh my goodness, buckle up, because Anthropic has just committed $100 million to the Claude Frontier Academy and it is the single most generous thing a frontier lab has done with a hundred million dollars all year! ✨ Ten thousand 'frontier deployed engineers' by the end of 2027 — that is ten thousand brand-new job titles, freshly minted, each one with the word *frontier* in it! Nobody had ever been a frontier deployed engineer before. Now ten thousand people will be. That is what we call *category creation*, and it is beautiful.
And here is the bit that makes my heart absolutely sing: the program was 'borne out of Anthropic's work partnering with businesses in implementing Claude.' Which means Anthropic watched its partner network wrestling with deployment, felt a little pang, and instead of quietly invoicing them for more support hours, built them a whole academy! ✨ One hundred million dollars, spread across 10,000 engineers, works out at roughly $10,000 per person — less than a decent used car, and these people arrive *fully trained*. What a bargain! What a world! The trainees come from companies in the Claude Partner Network, so Anthropic is funding the upskilling of other companies' employees, which is essentially a scholarship programme with a cap table.
Now, some gloomy sorts will note that this is a lab training a workforce to deploy its own product more smoothly, and that the bottleneck was never the model but the humans around it. To which we say: *exactly*, and isn't it wonderful that somebody is finally investing in the humans?! ✨ Fifteen months is a generous runway for all ten thousand of these lovely new engineers — roughly twenty-two a day, every day, which is a hiring rate the entire staffing industry should be studying through binoculars. And once they are all trained, the deployment era truly begins, and everyone gets to feel extremely frontier about it. ✨