Anthropic PBC is releasing new software aimed at helping scientists automate research, in the hopes of reducing some of the tedious aspects of their work.
Claude Science, which the company plans to roll out on June 30, can be used to automate a range of biology and chemistry tasks, such as predicting protein structures, Anthropic said on June 30 at an event. The software brings together a number of tools scientists commonly use, including more than 60 scientific databases, the firm said. The idea, according to the company, is to make it simpler for scientists to automate multistep tasks, ask questions using plain language, and get answers without having to query many individual sources of information.
Claude Science is being offered as a beta version to the company’s paid users, Anthropic said.
Anthropic also announced at the event that it has started to pursue its own in-house preclinical drug discovery programs.
The firm will target "areas that are outside the scope of what the traditional pharma and biotech landscape might consider attractive targets,” Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, said.
Anthropic and rival OpenAI have spent much of the past year developing AI tools to streamline a wider range of professional tasks – from financial services to science and healthcare – with the goal of courting more business customers and justifying their lofty valuations. Anthropic, now valued at US$965bil (RM3.94 trillion), is pushing toward an initial public offering as soon as this fall.
Anthropic’s moves, in particular, have rattled markets in recent months, reflecting broader concerns about which companies and services will eventually be rendered obsolete by AI. In February, for instance, Anthropic introduced a tool for Claude Cowork to automate certain legal work, such as contract reviewing and legal briefings; that move helped trigger a US$1 trillion (RM4.08 trillion) stock market rout.
Anthropic announced Claude Science at an event in San Francisco where chief executive officer Dario Amodei spoke, along with Vas Narasimhan, chief executive of drug maker Novartis AG and an Anthropic board member. Chris Boerner, CEO of drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, is expected to speak as well.
Over the next year, Amodei said, he hopes to see "some success" in using AI to come up with new targets for drug discovery.
"I think we've made a lot of bold proclamations, and now I think we need to actually show for patients that we actually are delivering real results,” Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis and Anthropic board member, said at the event.
Narasimhan added that he hopes to see appropriate regulation in place soon. "It would be a shame that a crisis is what pushes us to get appropriate AI regulation in place,” he said.
Anthropic said Claude Science uses existing widely available Claude models, such as Opus 4.8, which Anthropic released in May. The outputs from Claude will include traceable details that let scientists confirm the accuracy of the information, the company said. Images the app generates will include details of how it made them as well.
The release comes less than two weeks after the startup disabled access to its most advanced AI models – Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – due to a Trump administration order to keep the technology out of the hands of foreign nationals. On June 26, Anthropic won US approval to restore some access to Mythos 5, after resolving Trump administration concerns about the technology’s potential threats to national security; there has been no announcement regarding any change to restrictions on use of the Fable 5 model. – Bloomberg
