Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaks on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21, 2025.
Jerry Miller CNBC
Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new service for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology to advance scientific discovery.
Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools commonly used in labs during research and development.
Anthropic says it can assist researchers at every stage of the discovery process, from conducting literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, and drafting regulatory submissions.
The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the space and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as head of biology and life sciences.
“This is a critical moment for us to decide that this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams said in an interview with CNBC. “We want to run a significant percentage of the world’s life sciences research on Claude, just like what’s happening with coding today.”
Anthropic, one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, has developed a large family of language models called Claude. Founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, its valuation has grown to $183 billion in just four years.
The company launched a new model, the Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month, saying it is “significantly better” at life science tasks such as understanding laboratory protocols.
Kauderer-Abrams said researchers were already using Anthropic’s model to support isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish.
So Anthropic is Benchling, PubMed, 10x genomics Examples include Synapse.org. Anthropic also partners with companies that can help life sciences organizations implement AI, including Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.
“We are willing to work diligently to make sure all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
In a pre-recorded demo, Anthropic showed how scientists working on preclinical research can use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs testing different dosing strategies.
Scientists were able to query their lab data directly from Benchling and generate summaries and tables of key differences with links to the original materials. After reviewing the results, the scientists created a research report that could be included in regulatory submissions.
Anthropic said such analysis, which previously took “days” to verify and compile information, can now be completed in minutes.
Kauderer-Abrams said that while the company believes AI will bring substantial efficiency gains to the life sciences sector, it has “no illusions” that it can magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years don’t suddenly take one month, he said.
Instead, Anthropic focuses on “spotting” time-consuming and expensive parts of the discovery process to determine where AI could be most helpful.
“We are here to ensure that this transformation happens and that it is done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
Featured: Anthropic unveils latest AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5
