Credit: ZME Science.
Anthropic wants to prove its chatbot can do more than write code or summarize documents. It wants Claude to help invent new drugs and treatments.
At a San Francisco event on the 30th of June, 2026, the company said it will run its own preclinical drug-discovery programs focused on neglected diseases, including rare diseases, while also launching Claude Science, an AI workbench for researchers and drugmakers. The move pushes one of the world’s most visible AI companies into a field where success can take years, cost billions, and still fail—but where patients with overlooked conditions often have limited options.
New Lab Partner
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Anthropic framed the effort as a test of its own tools.
“We’re doing this because we believe first and foremost that to build the right models, products and tools to accelerate the industry, we need to live it along with all of you,” Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, said, according to CNBC. “We believe in the power of tight feedback loops, and there’s no substitute for having our own experiences alongside you all in the trenches trying to develop drugs.”
The company has not named the diseases it will pursue. Kauderer-Abrams said the programs would focus on preclinical work, the stage before a treatment reaches human testing.
Proposing a promising molecule or biological strategy is only an early step. Drugmakers must still run years of tests to see whether a potential treatment is safe and effective, first in the lab and in animals—when needed—and later in clinical trials with people. Anthropic has not said whether it would try to bring any drug candidates to market, license them to another company or pass them to partners.
Targeting the Overlooked
Claude Science displays proteins, structures, and molecules natively, with every result reproducible and traced to its code. Credit: Anthropic.
Drug companies often avoid small patient populations because the economics look difficult. Anthropic executives said they would pursue areas that its pharmaceutical customers are not already chasing.
“These are areas that normal drug development economics don’t incentivize or favor,” Jonah Cool, Anthropic’s head of life sciences partnerships and deployment, told STAT.
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Rare diseases may also give AI a clearer target. Many rare disorders stem from a single damaged gene. That can make the biological cause easier to understand than in common illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes or heart disease, where many genes, tissues, and environmental factors interact.
“The idea here is that the biology is often clear; the economics, if you’re trying to run a drug development business, are challenging,” Cool added.
Claude Science is pre-configured for genomics, single-cell, proteomics, and cheminformatics, backed by more than 60 scientific databases. Credit: Anthropic
In other related developments, Anthropic announced it wants to give scientists the same kind of workflow tool it built for programmers with Claude Code. Their official announcement describes Claude Science as an AI workbench for scientific research, made available on June 30, 2026. Reuters reported that the tool is designed to help scientists streamline research, analyze data, and manage complex computing workflows.
Cool argued that Anthropic cannot build strong scientific tools from the sidelines. “You can’t develop Claude Code if you don’t write code and have software engineering,” he said. “You can’t advance a tool like Claude Science and think about preclinical work if we are not engaged in that in any way, shape, or form.”
Big Tech’s Long Bet on Biology
Anthropic’s decision isn’t taking place in a void. Drugmakers already use AI to search for targets, design molecules, and analyze clinical data. Google DeepMind made one of the field’s biggest breakthroughs with AlphaFold, a system that predicts protein structures.
Anthropic has also been building ties to the industry. Executives from Genentech, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Novartis appeared at the San Francisco event. Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan joined Anthropic’s board earlier this year, and Anthropic acquired the AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio, reportedly for about $400 million.
The company’s new experiment could sharpen its products even if it never sells a drug. Working inside its own programs lets Anthropic test where Claude helps, where it fails and where human scientists still need better tools.