Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan joins Anthropic board

Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan has been appointed to the Board of Anthropic. Narasimhan, who has been at the helm of the Swiss pharma group since 2017, was appointed by the company's Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent body with no financial stake in the business and has been tasked with striking a balance between ethics and financial success.

Anthropic said Narasimhan “shares Anthropic’s conviction that healthcare and life sciences are among the areas where AI has the greatest potential to improve the quality of human life.” The company’s co-founder and president pointed to Narasimhan’s experience in overseeing the development and approval of more than 35 medicines.

Narasimhan’s appointment comes shortly after Anthropic accelerated its move into the application of AI to drug discovery by acquiring New York start-up Coefficient Bio for a reported $400 million, laying claim to a platform for target and drug discovery, as well as navigating regulatory requirements for development projects. Last year, Anthropic also launched Claude for Life Sciences, a group of large language models and an AI assistant designed to help researchers with tasks like writing code for statistical analysis, summarising papers, and generating testable hypotheses.

Novartis has been steadily building its capabilities in AI through partnerships with Microsoft, Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, Relation Therapeutics, and others. In a LinkedIn post, Narasimhan emphasised Anthropic’s responsible and ethical approach to AI.

Anthropic earlier refused to allow unfettered use of Claude for mass surveillance purposes and the development of autonomous weaponry. That led to Anthropic being declared a “supply chain risk” by the Pentagon, while Trump instructed all federal agencies not to use its technologies.