Digital Hollywood University to roll out Claude

Digital Hollywood University adopts Claude campus-wide

Digital Hollywood University will make Anthropic's Claude available to every student, full-time faculty member and staff member, not just selected courses or departments, starting in November 2026. DHU is a private university in Ochanomizu, Tokyo, run by a for-profit company rather than by the nonprofit school corporations that run most private universities in Japan, with a four-year Faculty of Digital Communication and a professional graduate school, the Graduate School of Digital Contents.

All students and staff get access in November

Students will sign in to Claude with an account issued by the university, and they will not pay for it. DHU says the setup gives them enough usage that they do not have to ration their attempts. Its reasoning is that creative work and research take many tries, and a student who stops because "a few more tries might cost too much" never learns to use AI properly.

The "first in Japan" claim rests on DHU's own survey

DHU says it is the first university in Japan to adopt Claude campus-wide, based on its own review of rollouts that Japanese universities had made public as of October 2026. In other words, the claim covers announced deals only. Hidetoshi Tojo, president of Anthropic Japan, said in the release that he was very pleased to see the first campus-wide adoption at a Japanese university, and that using advanced AI daily as a student, with an understanding of its potential and limits, would serve graduates well.

Claude joins a campus AI platform launched in September

Claude is not arriving on its own. DHU calls it one of the core pieces of a campus-wide AI platform that went live on September 1, 2026. The same day, the university started a teaching platform called the Campus Portal, and it extended the portal to every class when the third quarter began on September 21.

Several generative AI tools behind one gateway

The platform lets every student and staff member reach several generative AI tools through one university system, covering image, video and music generation as well as text. Students do not need separate subscriptions for each service. All AI traffic passes through a common gateway, which lets the university track usage by student and by class, and Claude adds one more model to that menu.

AI teaching assistants live inside the Campus Portal

In the Campus Portal, each class can have its own AI teaching assistant, which instructors set up by uploading lecture notes and course materials. Only the student can read their chats with the AI and their class notes. Faculty and the university see usage volume but not what was said.

The portal was not bought from an outside vendor. President Naotaka Fujii built it at the university's Reality Science Lab using generative AI, and DHU says it will keep improving it based on how classes and students actually use it.

How DHU plans to use Claude

DHU lists three areas for Claude: teaching, research and running the university. In teaching, that means study help in and out of class, planning, scriptwriting and research, and a sounding board during production.

In research, it covers literature searches, data analysis and help drafting papers. On the administrative side, the goal is faster office work and better student services.

Production for undergraduates, research for graduates

Undergraduates in the Faculty of Digital Communication can use Claude across almost every kind of production the school teaches. That runs from 3DCG, VFX, VR and AR through games, video, graphics, web design and media art to programming, and on to planning, marketing and PR. At the Graduate School of Digital Contents, Claude will support new-business planning and prototyping, research and analysis, and thesis writing.

Assignments redesigned around AI use

Rather than writing rules to keep AI out, DHU says it will design assignments and grade work on the assumption that students use AI. It will also set campus rules on declaring AI use in submitted work and on handling third-party copyrighted material and personal data.

Handing out accounts, the university argues, is not the same as teaching people to use AI well. DHU also ties the rollout to creator training funded by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, with the aim of producing creators who can build AI into their own production workflows.

Where DHU fits among Japanese universities

Japanese universities have been bringing in generative AI since 2023, but the earlier deals were built on OpenAI and Google tools. DHU's rollout adds Anthropic to that list.

Earlier deals at Tohoku, Shiga and Otemon Gakuin

Tohoku University said in May 2023 that it had adopted ChatGPT ahead of other Japanese universities, mainly to speed up administrative work. Shiga University started using OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu on April 1, 2025, calling it a first in Japan.

In April 2026, Otemon Gakuin University opened Gemini and NotebookLM to all of its roughly 9,500 students. Its guidelines ask each instructor to say in the first class whether AI is banned in principle, allowed with conditions or actively encouraged.

Claude for Education and the question of which plan DHU uses

Anthropic launched Claude for Education, a version of Claude for colleges and universities, on April 2, 2025. It came with Learning mode, which guides students through a problem instead of handing them the answer, and with campus-wide agreements at Northeastern University, the London School of Economics and Political Science and Champlain College.

DHU's release does not say which Claude plan it is buying. At Anthropic Japan's first-anniversary briefing on October 14 (see Anthropic Japan at one: customers up about tenfold), the company cited Claude Team for all students and staff at Digital Hollywood as one of its school deployments, Impress Watch reported.

Japanese campus AI has widened from staff to everyone

Taken together, Japan's university AI deals show access widening over three years, from administrative staff at Tohoku to students at Shiga and Otemon Gakuin, and now to every student and employee at DHU. Before adding Claude, DHU built its own gateway, one that tracks usage centrally while keeping portal chats private, and Claude joins it in November as one of several models.