Bristol Myers Squibb deploys Anthropic’s Claude across global operations

Bristol Myers Squibb announced a sweeping agreement with Anthropic to deploy its AI tool Claude as the “shared intelligence platform” across the drugmaker’s global operations. The deal will put Claude’s advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities in the hands of more than 30,000 BMS employees. BMS said the collaboration signals a “meaningful evolution” as it builds agentic AI capabilities into the day-to-day workflows that drive its drug R&D, manufacturing and commercial operations.

The rollout marks a continuation of more than three years of AI investment at BMS. The company launched its first version of an AI chatbot in January 2023, shortly after OpenAI’s ChatGPT emerged. Moving forward, BMS will deploy Anthropic’s developer tool, Claude Code, to speed up internal software and AI development to “unlock data and expertise long trapped in the disconnected systems that define biopharma today.”

Regarding core workflows that move drugs forward, BMS said it will evaluate the potential for applying Claude’s AI reasoning to BMS’ proprietary research data to aid drug target identification and optimization across its focus therapeutic areas of oncology, hematology, neuroscience and immunology. With AI’s assistance, BMS has set a target to halve the time from target selection to lead molecule identification.

For clinical development, the company is building automation into trial documentation while potentially minimizing the time between data locks and regulatory filings. For manufacturing, BMS is eyeing better quality and compliance with the help of AI ranging from root-cause investigations and preventive action documentation to batch release decisions. With commercialization, the company said AI could turn “field insights into structured intelligence that enables more personalized and timely engagement with healthcare professionals.”

Anthropic’s head of life sciences said a platform of Claude’s scale creates “a single intelligence layer” connected to thousands of data sources that can “generate a clinical study report from underlying trial data, surface the right scientific context from decades of internal research, or trace the root cause of a manufacturing deviation in real time.” The BMS-Anthropic collaboration comes shortly after Anthropic recruited the Novartis CEO to its board, signaling the company’s ambition in life sciences.