Anthropic launches Claude Science for autonomous biological research and drug discovery

Anthropic announced Claude Science on Tuesday, positioning it alongside Claude Code and Claude Cowork as a flagship product for scientific research. Designed to work autonomously from high-level instructions, Claude Science excels in computational biology and drug development by writing code, managing computer clusters, and prioritizing reproducibility. It interfaces with tools for genetics, chemistry, and protein biology. At a launch event for pharmaceutical executives, Anthropic demonstrated how Claude Science autonomously identified new drug candidates for phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare genetic disease. Anthropic also announced it will use the product internally to pursue treatments for rare, neglected diseases.

This launch follows Anthropic's earlier 'Claude for Life Sciences' plugins and signals a major push into AI-driven science. CEO Dario Amodei, a PhD scientist, aims to challenge Google DeepMind's dominance—especially after Nobel laureate John Jumper joined Anthropic from DeepMind. Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz estimated that Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model performs scientific tasks as well as a second-year graduate student. Claude Science is not meant to replace Claude Code but to extend it for scientific workflows, making advanced computing accessible to researchers who are not expert programmers. The product is available now to all paid Claude subscribers.