Claude on campus: How Anthropic is building a user base by launching AI clubs

With over 800 student organizations on campus, the University of Pennsylvania already seems to have a club for every interest, from investment banking to beekeeping—even cheese. Now, add AI to the mix.

In September, dozens of Penn students gathered in the engineering school auditorium for the debut of the Claude Builder Club, sponsored by AI company Anthropic. Over the course of this semester, the Builder Club has plans to host a hackathon, demo night, and other opportunities to create projects using artificial intelligence.

“I need the Claude premium for a year,” says Crystal Yang, a freshman who attended the first meeting. Claude, she had heard, is “better for coding and sounding more human in writing.”

Like Yang, many attendees were interested chiefly in the free Claude Pro and API credits offered. But according to their responses at the first meeting, a number of attendees also wanted to spend the semester working on problems with climate, healthcare, and manufacturing.

“Hearing other Penn students stand up and share what problems they were working on solving with the help of AI was genuinely inspiring,” says Alain Welliver, one of the Builder Club ambassadors leading Penn’s chapter. As an ambassador, Welliver is responsible for promoting the club and developing programming. He’ll receive a $1,750 stipend for his work.

Welliver, an engineering student, saw the ambassadorship opportunity this summer on LinkedIn and was quickly interested—he had considered creating a similar club before. To land the role, he completed a written application form about projects he’s built and his perspective on AI, and did an interview.

The Builder Clubs are part of Anthropic’s broader Claude for Education initiative, which also includes a “Learning mode” in Claude and free campuswide access for partnering universities. Drew Bent, the education lead on Anthropic’s Beneficial Developments team, suggests that economics students who take part in the Builder Clubs could, for example, use their Claude app to create an interactive simulator for a macroeconomics concept in minutes.

The first iteration of Builder Clubs debuted this fall semester; there are now over 60 participating universities. They’ve launched at seven of the eight Ivy League schools, SEC schools like the University of Georgia and Vanderbilt University, and international universities like the London School of Economics.

According to Greg Feingold, who leads the Builder Club program for Anthropic, over 15,000 students have signed up. More than 25 of the chapters exceed 100 members.

By the end of the semester, Feingold hopes to empower students to build projects they’re interested in, especially those who have found AI tools too costly or otherwise inaccessible before.

“I really want us to find those students who are not technical students and have them participate,” Feingold says. “I just know that we’re going to get some really amazing stories of people who have never written a line of code but were able to make an app for the first time.”

A certain type of agency

Victor Lee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, says tech companies have launched similar programs in the past, pointing to Apple’s Swift Coding Clubs as an example. “A lot of groups are trying to jockey for position and recognition, especially amongst a user base that is likely to be core to them,” he says.

Across college campuses, AI companies are everywhere. During the last finals season, OpenAI offered free ChatGPT Plus. At Penn, students recently waited in line for over an hour at a Google Gemini pop-up event—which included free Gemini-branded Owala water bottles. This has created concerns for educators, who worry many students are using AI to cheat.

In addition to being a Builder Club ambassador, students can apply to be a Campus ambassador and promote Anthropic products directly to peers. Anuja Uppuluri, one of the first ambassadors, shared on X Anthropic’s $1/month Pro subscription deal for Carnegie Mellon University students this spring. Her post received tens of thousands of views, and in the comments section, multiple students asked for the offer to be available at their schools too.

Uppuluri feels thankful that she took her introductory computer science courses before LLMs got popular: The temptation to use an AI tool would have been all too alluring.

 “There’s some type of agency about Claude Code that makes it different,” Uppuluri notes. “It doesn’t make it a tool. I think it makes it more like a pair programmer.”

Welliver finds Anthropic to be one of the few AI companies with an approach that fully aligns with his values. Part of the Builder Club programming that Anthropic has developed is education about AI safety and the societal impacts of AI.

“If you ask my friends, they’d probably be like, ‘Alain’s the last person to become a brand ambassador,’” Welliver says. Anthropic, though, is “really intentionally trying to do an ethical approach to advancing AI. I think those values transfer over to the club.”

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