Hitachi Partners With Anthropic to Deploy Claude Across 290,000 Employees

Hitachi announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic on May 18, 2026, combining its 110-plus years of operational expertise across industrial and infrastructure sectors with Anthropic's Claude models to accelerate what Hitachi calls AI transformation, or AX, across critical infrastructure in energy, transportation, manufacturing, and finance.

The partnership is built around a specific and growing challenge in industrial AI: as artificial intelligence evolves from digital tools into systems that directly control real-world infrastructure, what Hitachi and others call physical AI, the requirements for safety, reliability, and trust become substantially more demanding.

Hitachi's OT expertise, built across decades of infrastructure deployments globally, and Anthropic's frontier AI capability are being combined to address that challenge at scale.

"Through this strategic partnership, Hitachi can jointly solve customer and social challenges by combining Anthropic's highly trusted AI technology with Hitachi's domain expertise in mission-critical areas," said Jun Abe, Executive Vice President and Head of Digital Systems and Services Sector at Hitachi.

The partnership is organized around four areas. The first is customer-facing AX acceleration, combining Claude's code generation and analysis capabilities with Hitachi's system engineering expertise to improve efficiency and quality in system development and operations, and to enhance cybersecurity across critical infrastructure sectors through collaboration between Hitachi's Cyber Center of Excellence and Anthropic.

The second is enterprise-wide transformation at Hitachi itself. Hitachi aims to become one of the world's largest enterprise adopters of Claude, deploying advanced AI across all business processes for approximately 290,000 employees.

This spans software engineering productivity, corporate function efficiency, and automation of maintenance and operational processes. A parallel talent development program will enable approximately 100,000 employees to become embedded AI professionals.

The third is advancing HMAX, Hitachi's next-generation suite of solutions for social infrastructure, by integrating Claude's reasoning capabilities into equipment management through natural language interaction and maintenance optimization through advanced algorithms.

The fourth is the Frontier AI Deployment Center, a global organization spanning North America, Europe, and Asia that will serve as the core of Hitachi's AI collaboration ecosystem.

Starting with approximately 100 experts from both Hitachi and Anthropic, scaling to 300 over time, the Center will drive co-creation of physical AI use cases and deployment of advanced AI technologies in real-world settings.

Hitachi frames its internal AI transformation as Customer Zero, implementing AI at scale internally and using the insights gained to strengthen its HMAX customer solutions.

The logic is that a company deploying Claude across 290,000 employees in mission-critical environments accumulates operational knowledge about what works, what fails, and what governance is required that no external consultant or vendor can replicate.