Anthropic launched Claude for Life Sciences on Monday, bundling its AI assistant with connectors to lab platforms and new capabilities aimed at researchers working from early discovery to drug commercialization.
Key Points:
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 now connects to Benchling, PubMed, BioRender, 10x Genomics, and other scientific platforms, plus includes a new single-cell RNA quality control skill
- The model scores 0.83 on Protocol QA (a lab protocol benchmark) against a human baseline of 0.79, though Anthropic doesn't detail the test methodology
- Sanofi reports most employees use Claude daily; Novo Nordisk cut clinical documentation from 10+ weeks to 10 minutes, per internal metrics
The update comes as every major AI lab races into life sciences—Google DeepMind has AlphaFold 3 for protein structure prediction (already used by over two million researchers), launched its "AI co-scientist" system in February, and just partnered with Commonwealth Fusion Systems. OpenAI hired an award-winning physicist last week for its new science push and says GPT-5 can already perform "limited novel scientific research."
Anthropic's pitch centers on workflow integration rather than specialized models. The connectors let Claude pull data directly from platforms scientists already use—linking back to source experiments in Benchling, accessing BioRender's figure library, searching PubMed's biomedical database. The company is developing additional "Agent Skills" (instruction sets that guide Claude through specific protocols), starting with single-cell RNA-seq quality control using scverse best practices.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, who leads biology and life sciences R&D at Anthropic, said the goal is giving biologists the experience software engineers have with code generation—sitting down with Claude to brainstorm ideas and generate hypotheses. The company claims researchers can use Claude for literature reviews, protocol generation, bioinformatics analysis, and regulatory compliance work.
Novo Nordisk's 10-week-to-10-minutes claim for clinical documentation and Sanofi's reported daily usage across most employees suggest broad deployment for administrative tasks.
The launch also comes with a prompt library and dedicated human support teams, as well as implementation partnerships with firms like Deloitte, KPMG, and Tribe AI—suggesting Anthropic expects serious enterprise adoption in pharma and biotech. This push builds on Anthropic’s AI for Science program, which gives free credits to researchers on high-impact projects.
Claude for Life Sciences is available through Claude.com and AWS Marketplace now, with Google Cloud Marketplace coming soon. Pricing wasn't disclosed, though the free API credit program suggests Anthropic is focused on adoption over immediate monetization.