Anthropic announced Claude Frontier Academy on Friday, October 2. The pitch: $100 million to train 10,000 Frontier Deployed Engineers by the end of 2027. Cohorts are already running in San Francisco, New York and London, with engineers from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk.

A forward deployed engineer (FDE) sits inside your company until the AI works in the real process. Palantir made the model famous. Now the lab that builds the model is paying to multiply it.

That same day Mark Ajzenstadt wrote the sharpest take I saw. Many companies, he said, will rent this capability before they can build it. “The question is what stays when the engineers leave: working software, documented decisions, and a team that can keep improving it.” His rule: “Rent it from someone who plans to hand it over.”

I agree. Here is how I would turn that into something you can put in a contract.

Anthropic’s own curriculum teaches handover

Read how the training works. A few days in person, running a simulated deployment “from the right use case through security review to handover.” Then a 12-week residency where the engineer leads a real Claude use case at their own organization. Everyone arrives with a named project. First credentials are expected in early 2027, and entry is by nomination only.

Look at who is on the list. Accenture, Bain and Deloitte sell deployment. Commonwealth Bank, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk are training their own people. Those banks and that drugmaker chose to grow the FDE at home. A mid-size company in Central America is unlikely to nominate anyone to San Francisco. Most likely it rents.

When you rent, handover is not a closing detail. It is the product you are buying.

Five things that must stay

Imagine the engineer vanishes tomorrow. What would you miss?

Your accounts, first. Repository, cloud project, API keys, the Claude workspace: all in your company’s name from day one. If it starts in the consultant’s account and “migrates at the end,” the migration does not happen.

Second, the evals. An eval is a set of real cases with the correct answer already known. It runs every time something changes and tells you whether the system got worse. I wrote about why evals are what stays when the model changes. If the consultant built them without your people in the room, you do not own them. You rent them.

Third, a decision log. One line per rule: why the agent cannot approve payments above a certain amount, why a human reviews step three. In a year nobody remembers the conversations. The log remembers.

Fourth, one person on your side who has already changed something alone. To me this is the real test. Having attended the meetings does not count.

Fifth, the update procedure. Models change every few months. Someone has to know what to rerun when the next one lands.

Writing it into the contract

Turn the list into payment terms.

The most useful one is a handover test. Hold back the last part of the invoice until someone on your team changes a rule, runs the evals and ships the change while the consultant watches with hands off the keyboard. If they cannot, the project is not done.

Ask for documentation weekly, not at close. What gets written on the last day gets written badly, or never. And require that someone from your side work next to the engineer from week one, with hours blocked in their calendar rather than “when there is time.”

One disclosure about the Academy itself: its credentials are Claude credentials, and IQ Source works with Claude, so I have a bias. Still, the more your system depends on one vendor, the more your evals matter, because they are what lets you switch models without starting over.

How this fits with what I already wrote

On October 11, I covered Aaron Levie’s list of seven deployment jobs, and the conclusion was that three decisions cannot be outsourced. That post is about what you decide before hiring. This one is about what you hold when the contract ends. Levie wrote on October 4 that FDEs and new deployment firms are jobs AI is already creating. More supply of people to rent from. It does not mean they all hand over.

And the trade itself is old. In the consultant-to-FDE rebrand I argued it is the third name for the same job since 1990. The label changes. What you have to negotiate, the ending, does not.

About to sign a deployment contract and want someone to read the handover clause before your lawyer does? Send it to us and we will go through it with you