27, 2026 that its life sciences team has spent several months in research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines, and The Column Group.
The company has also acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company working on treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy, and has started its own drug discovery programs.
Anthropic says the work is mostly preclinical, meaning the drugs are not yet being tested in humans.
Generate Biomedicines scientists used Claude Code to design a shortened part of a CAR T-cell therapy; the best design was about 70% shorter and, in lab tests, produced roughly 10 times as many receptors on cells.
Divergence Labs had Claude generate about 35,000 antibody designs for a food allergy drug in roughly a month, and early tests found 20 designs that dislodged IgE, the molecule behind allergic reactions, three of which appeared to outperform the approved drug Xolair.
At BigHat, Claude helped improve two antibody fragments over about 10 weeks, and the best versions bound their targets more than 10 times more tightly.
Enveda said Claude flagged all 11 issues human reviewers found in 1,061 pages of manufacturing records, plus seven they had missed, cutting review time by 89%, and drafted a regulatory document in four hours versus about three months by hand.
Other work targets how biotech companies are run. The Column Group is setting up Pleiades, a company built around Claude to run more drug programs with a small team, and Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess early-stage clinical trial plans, with plans to expand that work in 2027. Mithril's founder, Cody Tranbarger, now at Anthropic, used Claude to coordinate 11 outside labs and took a possible treatment to promising results in mice in under 18 months; Anthropic expects a drug could be ready for human trials as soon as late 2028 if results hold. The company also said it has launched Claude Science, a workbench for researchers, along with Claude credits for life scientists, a verification program with more permissive safeguards for trusted organizations, and an open call for guest investigators. The early results are lab findings, not evidence of safety or effectiveness in patients.
