Anthropic’s Claude Life Sciences gives researchers an AI boost

Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s AI technology to advance scientific discovery.

Claude for Life Sciences is built on Anthropic’s existing AI models but supports new connections with other scientific tools commonly used in laboratories during research and development.

Anthropic said this system can assist researchers at all stages of the discovery process, from conducting literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more.

The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first official entry into the industry and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as president of biological and life sciences.

“Now is the threshold moment for us where we decide this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams said in an interview with CNBC. “We want a meaningful percentage of all life science work in the world to be conducted on Claude, as is done in coding today.”

Anthropic, one of the companies at the center of the AI ​​boom, is developing a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has soared to $183 billion in just four years.

The company launched a new model, the Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and says it’s “significantly better” at life science tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.

Researchers were already interested in Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, Kauderer-Abrams said, so the company decided to formally create Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish.

This meant Anthropic had to build integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, such as Benchling, PubMed, and more. 10x Genomics and Synapse.org and others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, including Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud.

“We are eager and excited to do this grind to make sure all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.

In a pre-recorded demo, Anthropic demonstrated how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs testing different dosing strategies.

The scientist was able to query his laboratory’s data directly from Benchling, creating a summary and tables of key differences with links to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist prepared a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission.

An analysis like this used to require “days” to verify and compile information, but now it can be done in minutes, Anthropic said.

Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can deliver real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but also has “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that took three years will suddenly not last a month, he said.

Instead, Anthropic focuses on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piecemeal” to determine where AI might be most useful.

“We are here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it is done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.

WRISTWATCH: Anthropic releases its latest AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5