Anthropic Launches In-House Drug Discovery and Claude Science AI Workbench

Anthropic announced on June 30, 2026, that it will run its own preclinical drug-discovery programs focused on neglected and rare diseases, while also launching Claude Science, an AI workbench for researchers and drugmakers. The move pushes the AI company into drug development, a field where success can take years, cost billions, and still fail.

The company has not named the specific diseases it will pursue. Anthropic executives said the programs would focus on preclinical work, the stage before a treatment reaches human testing. Drugmakers must still run years of tests to see whether a potential treatment is safe and effective, first in the lab and in animals, 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.

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," the company's head of life sciences said. "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."

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," the company's head of life sciences partnerships and deployment told STAT. Rare diseases may also give AI a clearer target, as many rare disorders stem from a single damaged gene, making the biological cause easier to understand than in common illnesses such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, or heart disease. "The idea here is that the biology is often clear; the economics, if you're trying to run a drug development business, are challenging," he added.

Claude Science is described as an AI workbench for scientific research, designed to help scientists streamline research, analyze data, and manage complex computing workflows. The head of life sciences partnerships 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."

Anthropic has been building ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Executives from Genentech, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Novartis appeared at the San Francisco event. The Novartis chief executive joined Anthropic's board earlier this year, and Anthropic acquired the AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio, reportedly for about $400 million.