Anthropic has launched Claude Science, positioning it as a flagship product alongside Claude Code and Claude Cowork for scientific research, with a primary focus on drug development and computational biology.
Announced at an event for pharmaceutical executives and biotech founders, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful scientific work from concise instructions. It integrates with tools used in genetics, chemistry, and protein biology, making it particularly applicable for drug discovery in rare and neglected diseases.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, said the product represents “how important this is to our mission.” He noted that Claude Science is designed to build on what scientists already find useful about Anthropic’s tools, adding code execution on powerful compute clusters and built-in reproducibility tracking so researchers can trace the source of any result.
At the launch event, Alexander Tarashansky, who led Claude Science development, demonstrated the system autonomously identifying novel drug candidates for phenylketonuria, a rare genetic disease. The company also announced it will use Claude Science to pursue its own internal research into drugs for neglected diseases.
The launch comes amid major shifts in AI for science. John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize for AlphaFold at DeepMind, recently announced he is joining Anthropic. Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz estimated that Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 model is roughly as capable at executing scientific projects as a second-year graduate student.
Available now to all paid Claude subscribers, Claude Science represents Anthropic’s bet that AI’s greatest impact on human well-being will come through life sciences. For MedSpark readers, this signals an intensifying competition between major AI labs targeting the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors.
