‘This ecosystem opportunity represents such an enormous part of how AI is going to diffuse into the world,’ says Anthropic Global Head of Partner Experience Karl Kadon.
Anthropic is expanding its push into the channel with a services track in its Claude Partner Network, already landing more than 100 launch partners with plans to graduate the first cohort of hundreds—maybe even thousands—of partners around October.
Karl Kadon, Anthropic’s global head of partner experience, told CRN in an interview that the born-in-the-AI partner program has four tiers and looks to give solution providers a value construct for outcome-based business models.
The vendor is designing a performance-based incentive that will go live later this year aimed at Claude deployments that materially advance customer outcomes.
“This ecosystem opportunity represents such an enormous part of how AI is going to diffuse into the world,” Kadon said. “We’ve gotten interest from over 40,000 companies who want to work with this technology. It far outpaces any partner program I’ve ever worked with. That’s no disrespect. It’s just emblematic of the opportunity that these partners recognize.”
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Anthropic’s Partner Strategy
Elaina Shekhter, chief strategy and transformation officer at Newtown, Pa.-based Anthropic solution provider EPAM Systems, No. 25 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, told CRN in a recent interview that one of the biggest opportunities for EPAM is in leveraging AI tools for software and product development life cycles.
“It’s helped us redesign the AI-native engineering or IT organization,” said Shekhter, who was promoted to her current role in March after about 11 years as EPAM chief marketing and strategy officer. “It’s massive transformation.”
EPAM revealed in May that it landed a multiyear strategic partnership with Anthropic to accelerate safe, reliable, enterprise-grade AI delivery. More than 20,000 EPAM professionals have trained with Anthropic Academy.
In addition, EPAM has about 1,600 Anthropic-certified professionals and is on its way to 10,000-plus Claude-certified architects as part of the deal with 200 additional “black belts” expected by the end of the year, she said.
EPAM has more than 650 scaled AI programs across its 1,500-plus client portfolio, Shekhter said. More than 80 percent of clients have at least one AI project going on. Half of the 650 programs run AI across multiple domains, implying multiple use cases inside a single client, she said.
Inside The Anthropic Claude Partner Network Services Track
Early Anthropic services partners include Elite tier members Deloitte, Accenture and PwC. Elite is the highest tier followed by Premier, Select and then Registered.
The tiers have uniform requirements for each company. Requirements include certified head count, active customer deployments and public references.
The distinction between the tiers isn’t necessarily proficiency, Kadon said. Some measures include reach, the ability to establish relationships, and the ability to co-invest. In his experience so far, every Anthropic account executive wants to work with partners.
“All partners in this ecosystem can feel really confident that their tier, their standing within this program, the road map of recognition that I am going build with this team into the program is going to categorically recognize them for areas of proficiency, whether that’s industry or product or persona” or elsewhere, said Kadon, who joined Anthropic in March after about five years with Databricks.
Anthropic teamed up with partner relationship management platform builder Euler to build a Model Context Protocol connector into Claude so that solution providers can use the AI tool to avoid needing to hunt down and download materials from the partner portal.
Solution providers can ask Claude Cowork or Claude Code to show joint customer pipelines with Anthropic, as an example.
“That puts the partnership in the hands of so many different people throughout the partner,” he said. “It will accelerate the business exponentially, in our relationship development exponentially, in a way that I’m very, very excited about.”
Kadon said he is also excited by multiparty solution developments by partners, highlighting security and governance use cases for Anthropic partners that also work with Snowflake and Databricks as an example—not to mention partners building dual practices with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft.
“I don’t want to reward inputs,” Kadon said. “I don’t reward logos. I don’t reward inputs or bean counting. This is about measurable, discernible outcomes and building a track record of responsible deployment of Claude through a wide customer base.”
Along with the new services track, Anthropic is rolling out a new Claude Partner Hub with real-time tier visibility, deal attribution, sandbox credits and an always-on program assistant built on Claude named PAM AI.
“Come build with us,” Kadon said. “There is a massive opportunity that these partners have to steward the world to responsible use of AI. That’s something that we really want to instill in them. We want to afford them the opportunity to do that with us and for the enterprise.”
