Why Modern Creator?

Matt Penny | Applied AI · YouTube

I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

One reviewer. Eighteen free courses. One weekend. Here is what actually passed.

Posted

June 9th

yesterday

Duration

12:37

Format

Review

sincere

Views

102

10 likes

Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Anthropic's 18 free courses sort into two buckets: the first two build real Claude fluency, and the rest are mostly filler that teaches about Claude without ever making you better at using it.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You are deciding whether the Anthropic Academy certifications are worth a weekend.
You use Claude professionally and want to know which courses add real skills vs. which add noise.
You are evaluating AI courses for a team and need a ranked shortlist fast.
You build agentic Claude workflows and want a second opinion on skills, MCPs, and Connections coverage.

SKIP IF…

You are brand new to Claude -- Claude 101 is fine for you, but this review is mostly about what to skip.
You are looking for a deep walkthrough of any single course rather than a comparative ranking.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

The reviewer completed every Anthropic Academy course and certification in a single weekend -- earning 99% across all tests -- and his verdict is that the certifications are nearly meaningless and most courses are outdated or redundant. The two exceptions worth prioritizing are Claude 101 (if you are new) and Claude Code 101 (specifically for CLAUDE.md, skills, and MCP content). Building with the Claude API is recommended for developers wanting technical depth. The AI Fluency variants (five total) are unanimous skips. The overarching lesson: learn Claude by using it on a real problem you care about, not by watching a course about it.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 01:00

01 · Hook + Setup

18 free Anthropic courses exist; he completed all of them to answer if they are worth your time.

01:00 – 01:54

02 · Claude 101 + Claude Code 101

Claude 101 is a decent intro. Code 101 earns its keep specifically for CLAUDE.md, skills, MCPs, and context management -- the rest is filler.

01:54 – 02:47

03 · Certification Reality Check

99% across all 18 courses. The questions are trivially easy -- paste them into Claude and it answers them. Certifications signal almost nothing.

02:47 – 04:08

04 · Skills + Claude Cowork

Skills are the core of agentic Claude. The Cowork course misses Connections entirely -- likely built before the feature existed, making it outdated.

04:08 – 05:27

05 · The Honest Meta-Verdict

Most courses are not the best way to learn. Pick a real problem, use Claude on it, and get support when stuck.

05:27 – 10:55

06 · Course-by-Course Rundown

Claude Code in Action (80% rehash), AI Fluency (skip), Building with the Claude API (good for technical depth), Intro to MCP (decent), Educators/Students/Nonprofits fluency (all skip), MCP Advanced (skip if technical enough), Bedrock + Vertex (huge overlap -- pick one), Sub Agents (skip -- use skills), AI Capabilities (just use the tool), Small Business Fluency (too short, too fluffy).

10:55 – 12:37

07 · Close + Real Advice

The real skill is not technical Claude knowledge -- it is identifying which business processes are worth automating. Courses cannot teach that judgment.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

Completing all 18 Anthropic certifications at 99% required one weekend -- the questions are so easy Claude itself will answer them if you paste them in.
The Anthropic Academy certifications signal almost nothing about practical ability; treating them as credentials is misleading.
The Claude Cowork course was built before Connections existed -- the feature now considered most powerful -- making it practically obsolete.
Four AI Fluency variants exist (general, educators, students, nonprofits, small businesses) and every one of them is a skip.
The Claude API course and the Amazon Bedrock course cover nearly identical ground -- pick one, never both.
Skills are the load-bearing concept for any real agentic Claude deployment; every other course topic is secondary.
Sub Agents have a dedicated intro course, yet they are less useful than skills for real-world task automation.
In AI, a course that is a couple of months out of date is already practically useless -- recency is a first-class quality signal.
The best way to learn Claude is to pick a real problem, ask Claude how to solve it, and use the features it recommends -- not to watch courses first.
The real skill gap is not technical knowledge of Claude -- it is knowing which business processes are worth automating in the first place.

Takeaway

What the Anthropic course catalog actually teaches you

HONEST AUDIT

Eighteen courses, one weekend, and one clear pattern: the courses that make you do Claude are useful; the ones that only describe it are not.

Claude 101 and Claude Code 101 are the only beginner-safe starting points -- the rest assume either too much or too little context to be consistently useful.
The CLAUDE.md file, skills, and MCPs are the highest-leverage concepts in the entire catalog; any course that covers them clearly earns its time.
Certifications in AI are not credentials -- they are completion receipts; anyone can score 99% by asking Claude the questions directly.
The AI Fluency courses (five total across audience types) share a common flaw: named frameworks that sound structured but offer no actionable path for real workflow automation.
The Claude API course and the Amazon Bedrock course cover almost identical ground -- choosing both instead of one is a straightforward waste of hours.
Course recency is a first-class quality signal in AI -- a training resource that misses a major platform feature because it predates that feature is not worth finishing.
The most durable meta-skill the catalog does not teach: identifying which processes in a specific business or workflow are actually worth automating before touching any tooling.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Skills (Claude): Reusable task templates saved inside Claude that allow it to reliably execute specific processes on demand -- the primary building block of agentic Claude workflows.
Connections (Claude Cowork): A Claude feature that links external tools -- Slack, email, Canva, and others -- directly into the Cowork environment, enabling Claude to act on live business data.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard that lets Claude connect to external servers, giving it access to tools, APIs, and data sources outside its native interface.
Anthropic Academy: Anthropic's official free learning platform offering 18 courses and certifications covering Claude usage from beginner to API developer level.
Sub Agents: Independent Claude instances spawned and directed by a parent Claude session to handle parallel or delegated subtasks -- distinct from skills, which are reusable templates.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:00linkAnthropic Academy ↗

04:08productApplied AI Mastermind (Matt Penny)

04:08linkTop 100 Claude Skills list

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

02:15

“They're basically worthless.”

Blunt one-line verdict on all Anthropic certifications -- no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

06:15

“Their approach is just complete bullshit. Like, it doesn't make any sense.”

Strong pattern-interrupt on a named Anthropic framework -- unexpected from a practitioner→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

11:59

“The real skill is not technically how to use Claude because you just asked Claude how to use it, but the real skill is how to spot processes which you can automate within your business.”

Clean thesis, quotable standalone, relevant to any AI productivity audience→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

03:24

“Things that are a couple of months out of date are practically useless.”

Tight, memorable, widely applicable claim about AI content recency→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

analogy

00:00Most people are completely unaware that Anthropic have 18 full length training courses all about Claude, and they're completely free. But are they actually any good? Well, this weekend, I went through every single one of them.

00:13I passed all of their certifications just so that I could tell you if they're any good or not. Yes.

00:18This is really how I spend my weekends. So let me break it down for you and tell you exactly which ones are worth your time and which ones are a complete waste of your time. Let's get into it.

00:26So let's start with the first one on the list, Claude one zero one. Now this is quite a good introduction. It takes you through talking to AI, the desktop app, which is certainly the best way to use Claude if you're new to Claude.

00:37It takes you through the basic features like projects and artifacts and skills, and it talks about tools and different modes, and they don't actually get you to use They're just telling you about the different features and how it all works. But with that being said, it's still pretty good. If you're new to Claude, it's pretty decent.

00:53However, a better approach is simply to download Claude, ask it what its key features are, ask it to explain those key features, ask Claude questions about all of its features until you understand them, and then ask it to recommend to you some tests that you can run so you can actually use its features. Because the only way you really learn this stuff is to actually use it.

01:14Okay. So next, we have the Claude code one zero one. Now this one is okay, but there's a lot of fluff in it.

01:19The good bits are, um, how it talks about the Claude dot MD file, which is very important, how it talks about skills, and how it talks about MCPs. This is where a lot of the upside of Claude really comes from.

01:30Also, the context management lesson is pretty good too because all of those things I've just mentioned are, like, the core of what makes Claude useful. The rest that's included within this course isn't really that relevant. I feel like there's a lot of filler.

01:43They do have a lot of videos though, which is a nice way to learn if you'd prefer to learn the videos. And let me talk about the certifications at the end, not just of this one course, but across all of them. I completed all of the certifications.

01:55I got 99%. I think I got one question wrong across all of the courses, and that's not to say, hey.

02:00How clever am I? But it's to say that these questions are stupidly easy. You can just ask Claude as well.

02:06You know? What's the answer to this? You can copy and paste them into Claude, and Claude will give you the answer.

02:11So if someone tells you that they have all of the Claude certifications, yeah, it doesn't really mean much. They're basically worthless.

02:18Now skills are one of the most important things to understand, not just in Claude, but for any agentic AI system. It's how you get AI to complete useful processes reliably time and time again.

02:29I have a list of my top 100 skills, which you can access absolutely for free with a link down in the description. You're gonna learn way more about skills by actually using them rather than just about reading or watching videos about them. So I would highly recommend going checking that out.

02:42Okay. Let's move on to introduction to Claude Cowork. The key parts here are really setting up Claude Cowork, skills again, and plugins.

02:51However, there's a hell of a lot that they miss out from this Cowork section, specifically connections.

02:57Connections is how you connect a load of external tools to Claude. So Claude can actually run within your business and do things like send Slack messages, monitor your emails, create things within Canva. However, it's just completely missing from this course.

03:12I can only assume that they created this course before connections were a thing, which was quite a while ago, which is to say that this is probably quite outdated, which in the world of AI, you know, things that are a couple of months out of date are practically useless.

03:28So although co work is one of the most useful sides of Claude, I can't really say that this course is actually that useful. Now at this point in the video, let me be absolutely honest with you.

03:38Those ones which I've just mentioned are pretty much the only ones worth your time. There's a few more that I will mention which are good or they have good aspects to them. However, none of these courses are the best way to learn, Claude.

03:49The best way to learn is not by watching courses, but it's actually using it yourself, and then getting support from people who know how to use it when you get stuck. I would highly highly recommend picking a problem that you have within your business or within your life, asking Claude how to solve it, and then playing around using the different features that it recommends.

04:08That's the true way to understand how Claude works and how you can get the most out of Claude. This is exactly the approach that I promote in my applied AI mastermind because not only do you learn the skill of Claude, but as you are building your first project, you're also creating real tools which you can use within your business to improve your business.

04:25So you're kinda killing two birds with one stone here. For example, in my Claude Anagenetic AI course, you learn to build your own skills that are specific to your business.

04:34And this way, you learn much more about skills because you're actually building it, and you end up with something which is useful for you. Or in the vibe coding course, you build six different bits of software from scratch, like a business dashboard for your business, a dynamic lead magnet for your business, and a time auditor.

04:49Or in the AI marketing course, you actually build your own lead generation flows. Also, as I mentioned earlier, being up to date is super important, and the Applied AI Mastermind is the most up to date AI learning resource out there.

05:03Much, much, much more up to date than Anthropic's own courses. We update it, uh, every two days new content is added. The price is just about to increase for the Mastermind.

05:11So if you are serious about learning and implementing AI, then use the link in the description to learn more. I am a bit biased, but it is genuinely much better than these free courses that Anthropic give you if you actually want to apply this stuff to your business to make a real difference. Anyway, back to it.

05:25Let's talk about some of the other courses. So next is the Claude code in action course. Now 80% of this is just a rehash of what is in the Claude code one zero one course.

05:35It gets a little bit more technical as it talks about things like hooks and SDKs. You might wanna dip into this, uh, if you wanna specifically learn about those, but the rest is basically the same as the previous Claude code course. And actually, um, some of the courses I'm gonna talk about, uh, later, um, have a little bit more information about the technical side.

05:53So if you are wanting to learn about the technical stuff, then, um, check out the ones that I'm gonna talk about later. There's then the AI fluency course. I would really just say this one is a complete waste of time.

06:03They talk about their four d framework, which is like delegation, description, discernment, and diligence.

06:10As someone who has used Claude for thousands of hours, not just within my own business, but implementing the stuff for other businesses as well with, like, plugins and skills and everything like that, their approach is just complete bullshit. Like, it doesn't make any sense.

06:25It sounds good. It sounds smart. If you're actually trying to automate a business with AI with Claude, it's just a load of hot air.

06:31Do not do this one. It's a waste of time. Let's move on to building with the Claude API.

06:37Now this course is huge. It took a long, long time to complete. It is very in-depth, and it takes you through everything from basic prompting, model temperature, running evals, tool cooling, embedding in vectors, MCPs, and a load more.

06:51If you really wanna get deep on the technical stuff behind Claude and specifically the API, then this one is pretty good. However, I do think you're better off just picking something you want to build, asking Claude how to build it, and going from there.

07:04Also, Claude is very good at writing its own API calls to Claude service, which kinda makes all of this practically useless as Claude already knows it, but there we go. This one kind of is useful if you really wanna get into the technical side of it.

07:17Then there is the intro to the model context protocol, so talking about MCPs. This one isn't bad because MCPs are really, really useful in the world of AI. This one is just a short course that does break it down quite nicely.

07:28Talks about MCP servers, talks about MCP clients and the difference between the two. And, again, the same thing I'm repeating through all of it. If you actually wanna learn how an MCP works, then use an MCP and create your own MCP server.

07:38It's not that tricky, and you will understand way more. So, yeah, this course is okay. It only takes a short amount of time to go through, and if you're starting from scratch, yeah, you'll learn some stuff about MCP's for sure.

07:47Then we have the AI fluency for educators. I have no idea why they created this.

07:53It's a complete waste of time. I am an AI educator, and I just saw zero value from this at all. So unless you've got a big desire to waste your own time, don't touch this.

08:03And to be honest, the same can be said for the AI fluency for students course as well. There's nothing practical in there. Nothing you don't already learn in the other courses.

08:11Skip it. So the next one is MCP advanced topics. This one is kind of interesting.

08:15However, if you are technical enough to understand what they're talking about in this course, then you probably don't actually need the course. Again, you're gonna understand way more about MCPs by actually building them and using them than going through this course.

08:27So kind of interesting, not the best way to learn about MCPs though. Okay. There is then the Claude with Amazon Bedrock.

08:34Now despite the bad name, this one is actually quite good if you're going to work with the Claude API. Takes you through many technical things such as interacting with images, XML tags, tool functions, rag, using different models, MCPs, and way more.

08:47However, you probably noticed that what is covered in this is pretty much the same as the other course talking about the Claude API. There is huge amount of overlap. So either do this or do the Claude API one.

09:00Do not do both. It might be worth dipping into it and just seeing what the different lessons are, and if there's one that you like, which is in this course but not in the other one, then just watch that one lesson. Then very related to this, there is the Claude with Google's Cloud Vertex API.

09:14This is virtually identical as the Amazon Bedrock one, however, specialized for Google's infrastructure rather than for Amazon's infrastructure. I'm kind of guessing that these have been made especially for the internal teams at Google and Amazon, but if you've done the Claude API course or the Amazon Bedrock or the Google Cloud Vertex one, you don't need to do all of them.

09:34Just do one if you're actually really interested in the technical side of Claude. I'll cover the next two together, which is the teaching AI fluency and the AI fluency for nonprofits. These are bad.

09:43These are a waste of time. It's just a load of fluff that is non applicable, kinda sound smart.

09:48There is nothing actionable here, so what's the point? Skip these. The next is intro to agent skills.

09:55Now this one is okay, but to be honest, it's just a rehash of a lot of the content about skills that have been mentioned in previous courses. So if you have already done the Claude code one zero one or the co work course, then there's really not a lot to be added with this course here. We then have an intro to sub agents.

10:10Skip this one. Just use skills instead. Sub agents aren't really that useful anyway.

10:15Skills are much better for real world use. Okay. Second last is AI capabilities and limitations.

10:21Not that useful. You can learn much more about what AI can and cannot do simply by using it and attempting real world projects.

10:28You're probably recognizing a trend here, which is just use the thing. Right?

10:33And lastly, we have AI fluency for small businesses. This course is so short that I don't see the point. It's not comprehensive enough to be the only course that you do if you run a small business, but also the information in there is really fluffy and not that useful.

10:46I have no idea who this course is useful for, so like I I can't really recommend this one at all. Instead, I would look at the co work course instead.

10:56That one is probably more applicable if you do run a small business, but again, that one's missing out a lot of stuff like connectors, which is probably the biggest thing within co work. So yeah.

11:04There we go. So there we have it. My overall opinion is that the first couple of courses are okay.

11:09If you are brand new to Claude, then, yeah, might be okay. However, you should really identify what you wanna build, identify what other people are building, identify bottlenecks within your business, and then just commit yourself to trying to solve those problems and learning about Claude and asking Claude how you can use Claude in order to solve those problems.

11:29A lot of people within my mastermind have found the support that I give them very useful as you don't know what you don't know and taking what other people have learned and applied and being able to, like, fast track. Your learning curve is very valuable at least to those people.

11:42So if you are interested about applying this stuff, then I would highly recommend checking that out. Link in the description. Now the real skill is not technically how to use Claude because you just asked Claude how to use it, but the real skill is how to spot processes which you can automate within your business and how to spot those opportunities where you can apply AI, where it will actually make a difference.

12:01That is the exact skill that I focus on within the applied AI mastermind. So if you actually do wanna make a real change to your business, then come over there. Not only will I help you learn about the technical sides of, uh, Claude, so you can use Claude and all the different features, but the more important side of where you should be applying it.

12:18Now you should go and watch this video next. It's all about skills. It's all about how you take your existing SOPs within a business and turn them into automated and reliable processes.

12:27That is it from me from this video. I hope you have found it useful. I hope it has saved you spending an entire weekend looking through Claude and looking through those courses.

12:35I'll see you in the next one. Goodbye.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Eighteen free courses. One weekend. One person who actually finished all of them. The Anthropic Academy has quietly built out a full certification track, and most Claude users have never touched it -- which, after watching this, might be entirely reasonable.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

06:02acronym

4D Framework (Anthropic AI Fluency course)

Delegation
Description
Discernment
Diligence

Anthropic's named framework inside the AI Fluency course for thinking about how to use AI. The reviewer calls it non-actionable and dismisses it as hot air for anyone trying to actually automate a business.

Steal forKnowing what NOT to teach -- framework-for-framework-sake is a pattern to avoid

CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK

04:08product

“I would highly highly recommend picking a problem that you have within your business or within your life, asking Claude how to solve it, and then playing around using the different features that it recommends. This is exactly the approach that I promote in my applied AI mastermind.”

Soft sell embedded inside the honest-review verdict -- uses his own credibility as the delivery mechanism. Repeated at 11:40 and 12:00. Not aggressive but present throughout the back half.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA

00:00linkAnthropic Academy ↗

Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

Anthropic Academy home

hookAnthropic Academy home00:00

Claude Code 101 screenshare

valueClaude Code 101 screenshare01:00

meta-verdict

pivotmeta-verdict04:08

AI Fluency course overlay

valueAI Fluency course overlay05:27

final thesis to camera

ctafinal thesis to camera11:59

Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

Anthropic Academy home

Frame at 00:11 from I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

Frame at 00:22 from I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

Frame at 00:30 from I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

Frame at 00:44 from I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

Frame at 00:55 from I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

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