Claude Maker Anthropic’s Channel Strategy Takes Shape: 5 Things To Know

A $100 million investment in the new Claude Partner Network and new certification program are among Anthropic’s big moves.

A $100 million investment in the new Claude Partner Network. Run-rate revenue nearing $20 billion. And a partner organization powerhouse under construction with executives from Salesforce, ServiceNow and Asana.

These are some of the early moves by San Francisco-based enterprise artificial intelligence vendor Anthropic as it looks to build a partner ecosystem to help AI proliferate throughout businesses large and small and in various industries.

Steve Corfield, Anthropic’s head of business development and partnership, told CRN in an exclusive interview that he is walking the walk, with the Claude AI productivity tool transforming his day-to-day operations just how it’s changing the business world and the way solution providers do business.

“When you’re a small company and you’re growing as fast as we are, you need the tools and resources,” Corfield said. “And I think Claude is just the best tool ever to drive that productivity and efficiency.”

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Anthropic Channel Push

With Claude’s potential impact as a new tool for the business world still getting written in the history books, Corfield views this channel push as the next chapter. Anthropic made a splash with its growing partner ecosystem with an inaugural Partner Summit, held Wednesday and Thursday in Carlsbad, Calif.

Although in its early days, Anthropic has already accumulated an impressive solution provider roster in its partner ecosystem. The Claude maker counts among its services partners CRN Solution Provider 500 members Infosys, Accenture, Cognizant, Slalom and Leidos, according to the vendor. The ecosystem also includes smaller solution provider upstarts like Tribe AI.

Statements Anthropic has put out in recent weeks revealing some of these partnerships have noted a focus on bringing AI to health care, public sector, telecommunications, financial services and other regulated industries.

As part of the deals, the solution providers have pledged to give Claude access to large pools of their employees. That includes 30,000 Accenture professionals and up to 350,000 Cognizant employees globally. In the December statement disclosing Anthropic’s Accenture partnership, the AI model maker said that its enterprise market share at the time had grown from 24 percent to 40 percent.

After revealing the partnership with India-based Infosys earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Amodei reiterated the vendor’s enterprise push to India’s CNBC-TV18 and said that other partnerships might be on the horizon.

“Anthropic is a company that tries to work with other companies,” Amodei said. “We’re not primarily a consumer company. We’re primarily an enterprise company.”

Here’s more of what you need to know about Anthropic’s early investments in the channel.

Major Channel Investments

Anthropic’s channel push includes an initial $100 million investment into its Claude Partner Network and partner access to a new certification program.

Anthropic partners are eligible for direct investment as the program scales, with “a significant portion” of the $100 million going directly to partners for training, sales enablement, market development, customer deployment success, co-marketing support for joint campaigns and events, and more.

The Claude maker is giving partners access to a partner portal with Anthropic Academy training materials. Partners also receive the sales playbooks Anthropic go-to-market (GTM) employees use and co-marketing documentation, according to the vendor. A services partner directory will list qualified partners for enterprise buyer discoverability.

Anthropic’s new certification program debuts with Claude Certified Architect, Foundations, a credential for solution architects building production applications with Claude. Certifications for sellers, architects and developers are expected later this year, with priority access to new certs as they roll out for partner network members.

Partners also receive a Code Modernization starter kit for assistance with migrating legacy codebases and remediating technical debt–which is one of the most in-demand enterprise workloads, according to Anthropic. Claude solution providers can leverage the tool’s agentic coding capabilities directly for client outcomes.

Growing Channel, Growing Business

Anthropic is a privately held company–with a variety of reports since late 2025 that the company wants to go public as early as this year–but it has been disclosing various growth milestones lately that show growing AI adoption among businesses in various sectors.

In February, when Anthropic disclosed that it raised a $30 billion Series G round of funding that valued the company at $380 billion post-money–with Microsoft and Nvidia counted among Anthropic’s investors–the company also revealed that its run-rate revenue has reached $14 billion, up tenfold annually over the past three years the company’s been collecting revenue.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic has now surpassed $19 billion in run-rate revenue. The company had $9 billion in run-rate revenue at the end of 2025.

In court filings this month, Anthropic revealed that it has generated more than $5 billion to date since entering the commercial market.

The number of customers spending more than $100,000 a year on Claude has grown sevenfold in the past year, according to Anthropic. More than 500 customers spend more than $1 million on Anthropic on an annualized basis. And the Claude Code agentic coding tool now has a run-rate revenue of more than $2.5 billion, more than double since the start of 2026.

Claude Code’s weekly active user count has also doubled since Jan. 1. Claude Code business subscriptions have quadrupled since Jan. 1. Enterprise use now represents more than half of Claude Code’s revenue.

Building A Partner Org Powerhouse

Anthropic–founded in 2021 by former members of ChatGPT maker OpenAI–plans to grow its partner-facing team fivefold, with dedicated applied AI engineers partners can work with on live customer deals, according to the vendor. Anthropic technical architects will help partners scope more complex implementations. Partners will also receive localized go-to-market support in international markets.

Since bringing on Paul Smith as chief commercial officer in August, Anthropic has been building a who’s who of enterprise technology partner executives as it goes further into the channel. Smith served about five years with ServiceNow, including as its president of global customer and field operations for about three years and chief commercial officer for about three years. He spent eight years at Salesforce ending in 2020 with a role as executive vice president and U.K. general manager, according to Smith’s LinkedIn account.

Anthropic’s Corfield (pictured) was hired in November after a nearly 11-year run at Salesforce. He spent about three years as Salesforce’s executive vice president and general manager for global alliances, channels and emerging products. His resume includes about three years with Microsoft, leaving in 2015 as director of U.K. services sales for Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support, according to Corfield’s LinkedIn account.

Anthropic hired Phil Samenuk in February as head of partnerships. Samenuk previously worked at Salesforce for about 15 years, ascending the ranks from sales development representative to senior vice president of global alliances and channel revenue, a channel leadership role he held for about a year, according to his LinkedIn account.

In November, the startup hired Michelle Tan as head of partner success. She worked at Asana for about four years, according to her LinkedIn account. She left Asana with the title of head of global partner program and development.

“We’re not just looking at straight, partner account management types–we’re going to bring people with very diverse muscle,” Corfield told CRN. “What we want to build here isn’t the same–nothing we do is the same. Everything we are building now is the blueprint for the future. So we need a different set of muscles and a much more multifaceted set of personnel to deliver that.”

An Enterprise SaaS Threat Or Amplifier?

In the lead-up to this week’s Anthropic Partner Summit, the startup made international headlines first as an apparent cause to a stock selloff for a variety of more-traditional enterprise software-as-a-service vendors after new innovations in Claude Cowork scared investors.

On the so-called “SaaSpocalypse” of stock selloffs for a variety of enterprise SaaS vendors, Corfield told CRN that AI will amplify great existing software. He pointed to deepening relationships with the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft plus his and his team’s experience from the SaaS vendors as signs that AI upstarts and more-traditional SaaS vendors can work together.

“That’s the model we want to build,” Corfield said. “This is why we’re hiring some of the leaders that we have and have these relationships and that credibility that can deliver through the channel and bring these organizations together rather than be it like we’re at loggerheads with each other. That’s not what we want to do.”

During Oracle’s Tuesday quarterly earnings call, the data base products and enterprise software vendor’s co-CEO Mike Sicilia and Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Larry Ellison dismissed the “SaaSpocalypse” as more detrimental to single-focus SaaS vendors.

“You’ve all heard the thesis or theory that new companies coding quickly using AI will spell the death of SaaS–I don’t agree with that at all,” Sicilia said. “I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren’t adopting them, but we are. Very rapidly.”

During Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call in February, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff also dismissed the SaaSpocalypse, saying his company had survived past SaaSpocalypses caused by the likes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re so grateful to make it through that,” Benioff said. “And we’re going to make it through this one as well.”

During the call, Benioff explicitly called out Anthropic as a partner and noted that Salesforce is an investor in the startup. Throughout the emerging AI era of business technology, the Salesforce CEO has expressed confidence in his company’s durability thanks in part to decades of data businesses host in Salesforce that companies like Anthropic need access to for AI to unlock insights.

“Our job as a software company is to help our customers create success and to take that and help them connect with their customers in a whole new way,” Benioff said on the call. “Our job is to take what’s available today and make it successful. And that isn’t where those platforms are today.”

Pentagon Conflict

The other big Anthropic story going into the Partner Summit is an ongoing dispute between the Claude maker and the U.S. federal government over exceptions Anthropic has requested for Pentagon use of Claude.

On March 4, the Pentagon–still known as the Department of Defense by statute but called the Department of War by the Trump administration–labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, blocking Claude use by customers as a direct part of contracts with the agency, according to a statement Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei put out March 5.

On Monday, Anthropic sued the federal government, in part, to dismiss the supply chain risk designation.

Corfield said that the supply chain risk designation’s narrow scope means that the majority of Anthropic’s customers worldwide are unaffected. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have also publicly backed up continued customer use of Anthropic technology despite the designation.

Corfield said that he couldn’t comment on Anthropic’s active litigation against the federal government.

“We are committed to national security–that is unchanged,” he said. “Our partners are still showing up as they were before. For us, outside of the DoD stuff, it’s very much business as usual.”

Although Corfield hasn’t seen much change in his line of work, Anthropic executives’ filings in the lawsuit show that the Pentagon battle could have negative effects on business.

Chief Commercial Officer Smith said that “government contractors for other components of the federal government have been directed to cut ties with Anthropic and to stop using Claude” and pointed to a partner with a multimillion-dollar annual contract for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who “immediately switched from Claude to a competing generative AI model for a deployment.”

“These developments make clear that Anthropic’s relationships with entities outside the national security sector are already beginning to erode as a result of the government’s pressure,” Smith said in the filing.

Thiyagu Ramasamy, head of public sector at Anthropic, called the government’s actions against Anthropic “an existential threat” in court filings. Anthropic expects an immediate loss of more than $150 million ARR in existing and expected Pentagon contracts due to exclusion from direct Pentagon sales or through “contractors, resellers, and systems integrators, which comprise a sizable portion of our Public Sector sales revenue.”

Among those who have made filings in support of Anthropic’s requested temporary restraining order (TRO) against the supply chain risk designation are Microsoft; Frank Kendall III, who previously served on Leidos’ board of directors from 2017 to 2021 and was U.S. secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025; and 37 engineers, researchers and scientists employed at Google and OpenAI, including Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, according to filings in the lawsuit.