> so that when the subsidies end and subscription costs shoot up

Subscription costs are capped to API rates as their ceiling (and, realistically, way lower than that - why would you even subscribe if you could just go pay-what-you-use instead), and those are already at a big margin for Anthropic. What still costs them a fuckton of money comparatively is training, but that is only going to get more efficient with more purpose-built hardware on the way.

Basicallly, I don’t see much of a reason to hike subscription prices dramatically. I don’t think they’ll stay at $100/$200 but anyone who’s paying that already knows how much value they’re getting out of that and probably wouldn’t mind paying more.

> I think it’s pretty clear what the purpose of this stuff is: get people so invested into the Claude ecosystem with certs and “modernization kits”, so that when the subsidies end and subscription costs shoot up they feel they’re in too deep now to switch to something cheaper.

It worked for cloud services :-)

Or what if local models get good enough to threaten the server based product?

Enshittifocation x rent seeking is the future of aithoritarian capitalism.

I recommend everyone explore local models.

_Open to Claude_ ;)

it’s crazy how you could easily lie about having 10 years experience because your results are not that much different from someone who has only used Claude Code for like a week.

You joke, but that does seem to be happening from what I've seen - Agile Coaches are rebranding to become "AI coaches" or "AI Enablers".

Maybe? My high school had typing classes and on word and spread sheets and whatever. They also had dental assistant program where you’d be certified by the time you graduate high school.

https://customization-agility-483.my.site.com/anthropicpartn...

Linked from here: https://claude.com/partners

As a consumer of them, I love them: a company with an influential, widely-used technology or platform spends a ton of money signaling to the industry exactly what's important to know about it, creating training curriculum for it, and a whole infrastructure to verify when someone knows it, I'm going to take them up on all of that, especially in the cases where the investment is like $100, a little bit of studying (the likes of which I'd want to do anyway if I'm learning something new, and I'm happy to have their structured, prioritized list of topics and/or guided curriculum) and a couple hours taking an online-proctored exam. From that perspective, I don't have a good reason not to have a certification in something that's super relevant to my role.

In interview/hiring situations where they're not expected or effectively required, they make for great chat fodder and a really good opportunity to exhibit awareness about yourself, the industry, and how the person on the other side of the table might perceive certifications given the context.

Unfortunately some business leads value these types of certifications and partner programs. I imagine there’s a great deal of overlap with these folks and those who use Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for purchasing decisions.

Most employees at most businesses show up do as they are trained and then go home, because that is what is asked of them. Even those who might have the inclination to explore new technology often will not for fear of doing something wrong. And that creates a big market for training: a company wants their employees to use Claude so the employees must be trained.

Startups / technology companies that expect employees to be self-starters who can be set free to frolic amongst the problems are an aberration.

My naive guess is that business with no tech component hire consultants, and these are part of the sales pitch.

Or governments/large organizations performing box checking exercises

Consultancies do. Deloitte are quoted on the page. Consultancy people at my place of work have all been "AI trained".

Doesn't stop them being useless though, like giving an electric drill to a chimp and telling them to build a house...lots of action, a lot of screeching, not much work.

One of the mistakes with AI is that people believe it will turn lead into gold: if you give AI bad prompts, AI will produce bad work.

I have a couple cloud certs because I was forced to get them by a previous employer. They are useless.

Think of these like the Google cloud or AWS certifications. A few companies that specialize in them will want you to have them. But for the rest of the industry, your ability to ace the technical interview will matter more.

Non-technicals do.

They do. Certifications make technical expertise legible to non-technical decisionmakers, and I've encountered people on both sides of that dynamic who affirmatively like it when companies set up programs like this. Obviously you and I would rather have someone who understands Claude make decisions about whether and how to use it, but in a lot of industries that's not realistic.

people no, legal persons yes

And/or it's a unique tool amongst the others.

It's part of enterprise sales which is how Anthropic will potentially be a long-term business.

Who purchases and greenlights adoption? These cycles are very long and partnering with consulting firms gets you cross industry access.

In fact, if you look at basically every major AI/LLM player you'll see a similar "alliance" or "partnership". Its a sales channel of high end referrals.

> who the audience is...

Businesses that are already in conversations about building partnerships and training with Anthropic.

The real revenue that foundation model companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and others generate comes from enterprise deals with a smattering of government - not consumer.

Consumer usage is largely a loss leader used as a training/refining tool, and it's best to view the economics of foundational model providers through the same lens you would a hyperscaler.

A major component to AWS's rise was the ecosystem built around training and teaching how to use the AWS ecosystem thanks to the AWS certification program. Same for K8s via the Linux Foundation.

By building a partnership and training motion, Anthropic can get the WITCHes, Deloittes, PWCs, Accentures, KPMGs, and others to start offering turnkey services, which is why Anthropic has been working on building co-sell relationships with those kinds of companies.

> lol certifications for a proprietary model stack is not worth the storage or paper

Are you sure? What about all those AWS, Azure, etc certifications that many places require their engineers to have?

We're 6 months away from some company's app/infrastructure/whatever going down and staying down, because literally nobody knows how the 500,000 line code base works and Claude is stuck in a loop.

LLMs are good for documenting specific things.

E.g., "find where the method X is called and what arguments are passed".

That can be useful for refactoring or debugging.

Coding is the worst way to use an LLM though.

Shhh...you're only supposed to unilaterally praise it to get along with your clueless leadership.

The same is true for every other strategy to avoid technical debt.

It is bullshit all the way down.

You can get API access to Claude from cloud solutions from those 3 vendors.

Why not?