Anthropic is best known as the company behind the Claude chatbot. Now it wants to make medicines. At an event billed as "The Briefing: AI for Science", it unveiled Claude Science, a new "AI workbench for scientists" that pulls scattered research tools and datasets into a single place and can generate figures and visuals. Alongside it, the company said it is starting an internal drug-discovery programme of its own.
From selling AI to making its own drugs
Anthropic framed the launch around what it calls AI's potential to "dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the development of healthcare interventions", and pointed to a list of biotech and pharma companies already using Claude. Then it went further. Its head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, said the drug work will focus on "neglected" diseases that traditional biopharmaceutical companies wouldn't consider attractive targets. As a public-benefit company, an Anthropic spokesperson said, it "can choose programs on patient benefit, including work the commercial market overlooks". Jonah Cool, its head of life sciences partnerships, said the aim is to focus on those neglected diseases even as Anthropic builds and sells AI tools to the wider industry.
An awkward position
Anthropic's plan is one of the most direct attempts yet by a major AI company to actually develop drugs itself, and it puts the firm in the unusual position of selling software to the very drugmakers it may now compete with. It joins a growing field that already includes AI-first drug companies such as Insilico and Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind spinout, alongside biotech startups and big pharma building or buying AI tools of their own. Anthropic's argument for doing both at once, as Kauderer-Abrams put it, is that to build the right tools it needs to "live it… in the trenches trying to develop drugs".
What we still don't know
For now, the details are thin. Anthropic has said little about which diseases it will target first or how far it will take any promising candidates. What is clear is the ambition: the company that helped put AI in millions of browsers now wants a hand in the medicine cabinet too.
