Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled Claude Science at an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers. The company describes Claude Science as a new product intended to support scientific research in the same way Claude Code supports software engineering: it can carry out meaningful, autonomous work from concise, high-level instructions and has access to tools designed for computational biology and drug development workflows.
Claude Science is now available to all paid Claude subscribers. Alongside the launch and previews, Anthropic announced it will use the product for its own drug-research programs targeting rare and neglected diseases.
Relation to earlier offerings
This is not Anthropic’s first move into AI for science: in October the company released plug-ins under the banner “Claude for Life Sciences” that help Claude work with scientific software and databases. Unlike that release, however, Claude Science is presented as a full-featured, standalone product rather than an add-on. By elevating Claude Science to sit alongside Claude Code and Claude Cowork, Anthropic signals that it views scientific applications of AI as a core part of its product lineup.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, said: “It represents how important this is to our mission that this is right up there with Claude Code and Claude Cowork as the next really significant product that we’re releasing.” He framed the effort as aligned with Anthropic’s mission to develop AI that serves humanity’s long-term well-being, where life sciences present the greatest opportunity.
Competition and talent shifts
For the past decade Google DeepMind has been prominent at the intersection of AI and science; Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on AlphaFold, and DeepMind has contributed to meteorology, materials science and other fields. But in recent months rapid advances in AI have changed the competitive landscape, and DeepMind has been described as falling behind in some areas—particularly code generation, a highly lucrative application for large language models.
Anthropic is well positioned to take on a leading role. CEO Dario Amodei is a PhD scientist, and many researchers are active users of tools like Claude Code. Because modern scientific research often requires coding but not all scientists are expert programmers, products that lower the barrier to computational work can materially increase productivity. The company also recently gained a high-profile scientific hire: John Jumper announced earlier this month that he is leaving DeepMind for Anthropic.
Capabilities, reproducibility and focus
Anthropic says Claude Science is not meant to replace Claude Code or Claude Cowork in researchers’ workflows but to build on the capabilities that scientists already find useful. Beyond writing code, Claude Science helps scientists run their code on powerful compute clusters—an operational need that many researchers face but that can be difficult to manage.
A priority for the product is reproducibility: scientists should be able to trace the provenance of any figure or result and verify its accuracy and validity. While Claude Science could in principle assist many scientific domains, its design and marketing clearly emphasize molecular and cellular biology and drug development.
The system can interface with tools used in genetics, chemistry, and protein biology, all of which are relevant to identifying drug targets and candidates. At the event, Alexander Tarashansky, who led Claude Science’s development, demonstrated the system autonomously identifying new drug candidates for phenylketonuria, a rare genetic disease.
Anthropic’s own research and business context
Anthropic will also use Claude Science in-house to pursue drug candidates for neglected diseases, both to advance science and to learn how the product performs in real-world research settings.
There are clear humanitarian reasons to prioritize drug development when building a general-purpose scientific research tool, and AI leaders often point to curing disease as a major potential benefit. It is also notable that pharmaceutical companies have much deeper pockets than academic labs. Anthropic says it is poised to record its first profitable quarter, and new pharmaceutical contracts could help sustain profitability—an increasingly important consideration as the company prepares for an IPO later this year.
