Anthropic Academy: Free AI Training on Claude Unveiled

Anthropic Academy: Free AI Training on Claude Unveiled

Summary

• Anthropic Academy, a platform focused on Claude and hosted on Skilljar
• A catalog of 20 courses, to choose from based on your level
• A self-paced learning path, with a quiz, but no gamification
• What the certifications from Anthropic Academy are really worth
• Anthropic Academy: the strengths and limitations of the platform

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google: the three players currently dominating the artificial intelligence market each offer their own training platform, free and open access. Official resources, developed by the teams behind these models, are often unknown to French-speaking professionals. In this series of articles, BDM invites you to explore these platforms from the inside. What do they actually contain? Who are they aimed at? What can you really learn there? What is the value of the certifications they provide?

The third episode of this series is dedicated to Anthropic Academy, the official training platform of Anthropic, launched in early March 2026. Hosted on Skilljar rather than on a dedicated company site, it stands out from the previous two by its significantly more technical focus, centered on Claude and its ecosystem (API, MCP, Claude Code). This positioning does not exclude non-developer profiles, as we will see.

Anthropic Academy, a platform focused on Claude and hosted on Skilljar

Unlike the other two previously explored platforms, Anthropic Academy does not operate on a site owned by Anthropic. It is hosted on Skilljar, a training management platform used by many companies to distribute their educational content.

To take a course, no Anthropic account is necessary; however, you will need to create one on Skilljar. The distinction between the two accounts is explicitly stated by the company in a FAQ section present on each course page. Skilljar is limited to tracking educational progress, while an Anthropic account is only necessary for using Claude on a daily basis once the training is completed.

The catalog is aimed at a broader audience than the platform's technical orientation might suggest. Alongside courses designed for developers, there are paths tailored for teachers, students, associations, or small businesses. They are built around a common educational foundation, a program called “4D” (Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence), designed in collaboration with university researchers.

How to access courses on Anthropic Academy?

Registration is free and can be done from the site anthropic.skilljar.com in three steps:

• Provide an email address (with an optional company name)
• Verification via a link received by email
• Then fill out a second form with your first name, last name, and a password

No Anthropic account or paid Claude subscription is required for the vast majority of courses. An exception exists for the course titled “Claude Code 101,” which requires access to Claude via a paid plan or an API key to complete the practical exercises. Skilljar remains a third-party online training tool, distinct from the account used for daily interactions with Claude.

A catalog of 20 courses, to choose from based on your level

The catalog has significantly expanded since the platform's launch. Initially composed of 13 courses, it now includes 20. No filters by level appear on the catalog page, unlike Google Skills. However, each course displays its number of lessons and total duration even before registration. Each lesson also indicates an estimated time, which can vary from one module to another. The prerequisites for each course clearly outline three levels of competency.

Courses without prerequisites to discover Claude

The course “Claude 101” introduces you to the daily use of Claude, with no prerequisites. The variations of the 4D program follow the same logic: they are accessible to anyone who simply has access to a conversational AI tool. On the agent side, the course “Introduction to Claude Cowork” applies the same principle. You get hands-on experience with Claude Cowork, the tool that allows Claude to work directly on your files and folders, based on concrete tasks and without writing a line of code.

Courses for beginner or experienced developers

The course “Claude Platform 101,” which includes 14 lessons, is aimed at developers who have already used Claude in a conversation but have not yet integrated it into an application. It starts with the basics: the concept of a request, the agent loop, and context management. The course “Building with the Claude API” targets a more advanced audience, comfortable with Python, to deepen their knowledge on prompt evaluation, augmented search, and building agents. This level distinction is not found in OpenAI Academy, for example, where the three offered courses follow a single linear path.

More technical courses to go further with Claude

Once the basics are established, other courses allow for a deeper dive into specific aspects of the Claude ecosystem. Claude Code, which is Anthropic's tool for AI-assisted coding, has its own introductory course (12 lessons, about an hour and a half of video), as well as a more advanced course focused on its integration into an existing workflow. Among the other courses offered in the Anthropic Academy catalog, there is the Model Context Protocol, also covered in two parts, with an introduction to building servers and clients, followed by a section dedicated to more advanced topics, such as “sampling” or memory management.

And for teams deploying Claude via a cloud provider rather than through Anthropic's direct API, two distinct courses cover Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Both require prior experience with the respective cloud platform.

A self-paced learning path, with a quiz, but no gamification

Each course combines text, diagrams, code snippets, and video, though the latter is not always present. Navigation between different parts of each course remains free throughout the program. Unlike OpenAI Academy, which enforces the order of lessons, the Anthropic Academy platform allows you to mark a lesson as completed even if you have not finished the one preceding it.

Progress tracking exists at multiple levels. On the course page, a bar displays the number of lessons completed and a percentage, with a “Resume” button that takes you exactly where you left off, including on a quiz already started. Your profile page shows a table listing all the courses followed simultaneously, along with their respective statuses. The learning mechanics remain straightforward: no badges, no points system, or leagues, as is the case on Google Skills. The learner remains focused on their training path.

Once you have completed a course, you are assessed by a graded quiz, the success of which determines the issuance of the completion certificate. We tested it on “Claude 101”: the quiz contained 13 questions, but only 10 were actually counted towards the final score, with the last three being part of a satisfaction survey included at the end of the question series rather than in a separate module. No time limit is imposed during the quiz. Only an informational timer is displayed.