Anthropic Academy Guide: All 13 Free Claude Courses

Anthropic launched Anthropic Academy in March 2026, consolidating their scattered Claude tutorials into 13 online courses. All free, self-paced, with official certificates on completion.

This article covers every course, its prerequisites, and recommended learning paths based on your role. When courses get added or updated, this page gets updated too.

All 13 Courses at a Glance

The courses split into two groups: 6 courses require no coding and work for everyone; 7 are developer-focused and require Python or CLI experience.

For Everyone: Getting Started with Claude

Claude 101

If you can only take one course, take this one. Claude 101 teaches you to use Claude for everyday work: writing emails, organizing data, analyzing documents, drafting content. No technical background needed. It simply teaches you how to talk to an AI and get real work done.

This course is a starting point. After completing it, you'll know what Claude can do and which direction you want to go deeper.

The AI Fluency Series

AI Fluency is a course series co-developed by Anthropic and academic partners, built around the "4E Framework": Effective, Efficient, Ethical, and Safe.

Framework & Foundations is the universal version. This course teaches thinking frameworks rather than just button clicks: where AI's capability boundaries lie, which tasks should be delegated to AI, and when human judgment can't be replaced. You'll walk away knowing not just how to use Claude, but when not to. Taught by Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork) and Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College), with a certificate on completion.

The other four are audience-specific extensions:

• For Students: Focuses on academic research, career planning, and learning strategies
• For Educators: Teaches how to integrate AI into instruction, including curriculum design and assessment strategies
• Teaching AI Fluency: Teaches how to teach others to use AI, covering scenario design and learning outcome evaluation
• For Nonprofits: Co-developed with GivingTuesday, tailored for resource-constrained organizations

For Developers: From API Calls to Agent Architecture

This is where the technical depth lives. Seven courses covering the full Claude development stack, from your first API call to deploying production-grade agent systems.

Building with the Claude API

Prerequisites: Python, JSON basics

This is the required course for developers. It starts from your first API call and builds up to agent system architecture:

• API setup and authentication (API key management, request format)
• Multi-turn conversations and system prompt design
• Prompt engineering (XML tag structuring, few-shot learning)
• Tool use: letting Claude call external functions you define
• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): giving Claude access to your data
• Extended thinking mode and prompt caching
• Agent architecture: parallelization, routing, multi-step task orchestration

If you're a backend or full-stack engineer building Claude into a product, start here.

Claude Code in Action

Prerequisites: Terminal experience, Git basics

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool. It reads your codebase, edits files, and runs commands. This course teaches you to integrate it into your daily workflow:

• How Claude Code's tool system interacts with your codebase
• Context management strategies (helping it understand your project)
• Custom commands (automating repetitive tasks)
• MCP server integration (connecting external tools like browser automation)
• GitHub workflows (automated code review)
• When to use thinking mode vs. planning mode

After this course, follow up with our hands-on First Hour with Claude Code tutorial to practice on your own project.

Introduction to Agent Skills

Prerequisites: Basic Claude Code experience

Agent Skills extend Claude Code through Markdown files (SKILL.md) that Claude Code automatically applies at the right moments. This course covers:

• How Skills differ from CLAUDE.md, hooks, and subagents
• Writing a SKILL.md from scratch (frontmatter format, trigger descriptions)
• Directory structure design (managing context window consumption)
• Advanced configuration: restricting tool access, background scripts
• Team sharing (committing to repos) and enterprise deployment (managed settings)
• Wiring Skills into custom subagents

Pairs well with our Write Your First SKILL.md tutorial for hands-on practice.

The MCP Series (2 Courses)

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard from Anthropic that lets AI agents connect to external tools and data sources through a unified interface.

Introduction to Model Context Protocol teaches you to build MCP servers and clients from scratch in Python. The course centers on three core primitives:

• Tools: Model-controlled actions, like querying databases or making API requests
• Resources: Application-controlled read-only data, like config files
• Prompts: Pre-defined instruction templates, like "review this code"

You'll also learn to test and debug using the MCP Server Inspector in your browser.

MCP: Advanced Topics goes deeper into production concerns:

• Sampling: letting servers request language model calls through clients
• Transport mechanisms: stdio (local) vs. Streamable HTTP (remote)
• Roots-based file access permission design
• Horizontal scaling and load balancer deployment strategies

Take the intro first. Together, both courses give you everything needed to build a deployable MCP server from scratch.

Cloud Platform Integration (2 Courses)

If your team deploys Claude on AWS or GCP, Anthropic has platform-specific courses:

• Claude with Amazon Bedrock: Deploying Claude on AWS Bedrock, covering tool use, RAG, and agent architecture
• Claude with Google Vertex AI: Same on GCP Vertex AI, with additional coverage of vision, PDF processing, and citations

Both courses overlap significantly with Building with the Claude API. The main differences are deployment platform and authentication. If you've already taken the API course, just pick whichever cloud platform you use.

Learning Resources Beyond Anthropic Academy

Official Documentation

• Claude API Docs: Complete API reference with all endpoints, parameters, and error codes
• Claude Code Docs: Full Claude Code documentation, from installation to advanced configuration

GitHub Open-Source Courses

anthropics/courses provides 5 sets of Jupyter Notebooks:

1. Anthropic API Fundamentals: Core API operations
2. Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial: 9 chapters of interactive prompt engineering
3. Real World Prompting: Production prompt design
4. Prompt Evaluations: Prompt evaluation methodology
5. Tool Use: Complete tool calling implementation

Each notebook runs locally so you can code along. Compared to Skilljar's video courses, these suit developers who prefer learning by doing. The notebooks use lower-cost models (Claude 3 Haiku), keeping API costs minimal while learning.

Anthropic Cookbook

The Anthropic Cookbook collects advanced implementation examples covering PDF processing, embeddings, citations, and more. Best suited for developers who've completed the foundational courses and want reference implementations for specific features.

Claude Tutorials

claude.com/resources/tutorials offers video and written guides covering Claude Code remote control, Cowork plugin development, model selection, and other topics.

Where Should You Start?

You don't need to take all 13. Pick the path closest to your goal.

"I've never used Claude and want to try it" → Claude 101 → AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations

"I'm a developer building Claude into a product" → Building with the Claude API → your cloud platform course

"I already use Claude Code and want to go deeper" → Claude Code in Action → Introduction to Agent Skills → Plus our hands-on First Hour with Claude Code tutorial

"I want to connect Claude to external tools" → Introduction to MCP → MCP: Advanced Topics

"I'm a teacher wanting to use AI in my classroom" → AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations → AI Fluency for Educators → Teaching AI Fluency

All courses are on Anthropic Academy. Free, no time limits, go at your own pace.