On March 12, 2026, Anthropic introduced its first technical certification, the Claude Certified Architect, Foundations. It is an exam for the people who build production applications with Claude, and it exists because the market needed a way to tell real Claude depth from a confident pitch.
When you bring someone in to implement Claude in your business, you are trusting a claim of expertise you usually cannot check. The field is full of generalists who picked up Claude last quarter. From the outside the work looks the same. The difference shows up after it ships.
A technical certification gives owners and operators something concrete to ask for. It does not replace a track record or judgment, but it raises the floor. It tells you the person across the table has been measured against real production scenarios by the company that builds the model.
We think that bar matters. It is why we are building Shannon Advisory around it.
The exam is a single proctored session: 60 multiple-choice questions in 120 minutes, no breaks and no outside resources. Each sitting draws four scenarios from a pool of six, every one a realistic production context, from a customer support resolution agent to a multi-agent research system to a continuous-integration pipeline. Candidates receive a score report with section breakdowns within two business days. The exam fee is $99.
The credential is currently available to Anthropic partners. Anthropic publishes a full exam guide with the complete scenario set and exam structure.
We are pursuing the Claude Certified Architect credential and building our team around it. That means hiring people who can earn it and funding the work to get there. We would rather be measured against Anthropic's own technical bar than ask you to take our word for it.
That standard is the firm. If you are a strong Claude practitioner, or you are set on becoming one, we want to hear from you.