The Claude Partner Network: What It Is and How to Choose

The Claude Partner Network is Anthropic’s program for firms that implement Claude for other businesses. It opened on 12 March 2026, it is free to join, and Anthropic says any organization bringing Claude to market is eligible. Partners get training, sales material and access to Anthropic’s own engineers on live deals, and Anthropic has committed an initial $100 million for 2026 to partner training, enablement and co-marketing.

For a buyer, the part that matters is the public directory of services partners at partnerhub.claude.com. This guide explains what that directory tells you, what it leaves out, and how to choose among the firms in it. Our own ranking of Claude partners applies the same questions to the firms that serve small and mid-sized companies.

What the directory shows

On 26 October 2026 the directory listed 331 firms. Each profile carries the same fields:

Tier. Global Premier, Preferred or Select. Sixteen firms were Global Premier, 40 Preferred and 256 Select, with 19 showing no tier.
Budget bands. From under $25,000 through $25,000 to $100,000, $100,000 to $500,000, $500,000 to $2 million, and above $2 million. A firm can tick several.
Customer sizes. Micro SMB under 100 employees, SMB, mid-market, enterprise and large enterprise.
Where Claude runs. The Claude API directly, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex or Microsoft Foundry.
Delivery. On site, hybrid or remote, the regions covered, and the languages spoken.
Industries and use cases, chosen by the partner.

Anthropic adds firms to the directory once they qualify, and it has not published the criteria for qualifying or for each tier.

What the tiers mean

The Global Premier tier is the large system integrators and strategy houses: Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, BCG, McKinsey, Capgemini, Cognizant and their peers. If your budget starts in the millions and your board wants one of those names, the choice is among them, and the directory adds little.

Preferred and Select are where most buyers will look. Preferred includes established engineering consultancies such as Caylent, Slalom, Thoughtworks, phData and Tribe AI, along with smaller specialists. Select is the long list, from offshore development companies with thousands of engineers to studios of a dozen people.

A tier is evidence that Anthropic accepted the firm and, for Preferred, that it has gone further with Anthropic. It is not a measure of the firm’s work for anyone like you, and the directory carries no ratings, reviews or case studies.

What the directory leaves out

Three things a buyer needs are missing from every profile:

Published Claude work. Many partners list Claude beside OpenAI, Google and AWS models without a single case in which Claude did the job. Ask for one.
Outside reviews. The directory has none, so look the firm up on Clutch, G2 or Google and read what clients say about delivery.
Price. The budget bands are wide on purpose. A firm that ticks every band from under $25,000 to above $2 million has told you nothing about what your project will cost.

How to choose a Claude partner

Start from the job, because the firms in the directory do very different things.

Rolling out Claude to a team. You want training, a governance policy and someone to connect Claude Enterprise to your documents and systems. Ask how they handle permissions on connected data and who owns the policy once they leave.

Rolling out Claude Code to engineers. You want a firm whose own engineers use it daily. Ask what it will be allowed to change, how its pull requests are reviewed, and what happened to defect rates at a client who did this before you.

Building an agent or an integration. You want engineering depth. Ask which model calls are logged and evaluated, what the agent does when it is unsure, and what it costs to run per task once it is live. A firm that cannot answer the last question has not run one in production.

Then the questions for every firm:

Which of your published cases used Claude as the model, and can I speak to that client?
Who will do the work, and are they certified by Anthropic?
Do you also implement other models, and how do you decide which to use?
What do you charge for a project my size, and what is excluded?

When you do not need a partner

If your team only needs Claude seats and a short policy on what goes into it, buy the seats. Anthropic’s own documentation and Academy courses cover the basics, and a partner’s fee buys nothing you cannot do yourselves. Bring one in when Claude has to reach company systems, act without a person checking each step, or change how an engineering team works.