Anthropic pushed Claude Science live on June 30, in beta for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise tiers, with a discounted Team plan on offer for academic labs and nonprofit research organizations. The pitch is that a working scientist can operate inside a single environment that already knows how to talk to UniProt, PDB, Ensembl, Reactome, ClinVar, ChEMBL, and GEO, and can call into NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit for Evo 2, Boltz-2, and OpenFold3 without the researcher writing glue code. Sixty-plus skills come pre-configured across genomics, proteomics, and cheminformatics. Reviewer agents check citations and calculations before an artifact leaves the workbench. 3D protein structures, genome tracks, and chemical structures render natively.
The list of early customers is the tell. Novo Nordisk is on it. The Allen Institute is on it, using Claude Science to build multi-agent computational review templates. UCSF’s Brain Tumor Center is on it, running germline variant analysis through the workbench. Manifold Bio nominated tissue-targeting medicine targets with it. This is not a demo tier of hobbyist researchers poking at a beta. It is enterprise pharma and top-flight academic bio, quoted in the launch post, doing real work.
Alongside the product, Anthropic announced its own internal drug-discovery program. The framing is deliberate: focus on neglected diseases that the traditional biopharma pipeline treats as economically unattractive. That is a good line for a launch post. It is also a very safe first vertical for a frontier lab to enter, because failure looks like altruism and success looks like a moat.
There is a grant program attached. Up to fifty projects get $30,000 in Claude credits each, with Modal chipping in up to $2,000 in compute. Applications close July 15. Projects run September through December. In practice this is Anthropic seeding a cohort of scientific power-users right at the moment that Google’s Isomorphic and OpenAI’s biology efforts are becoming publicly visible programs of their own. The pharma-AI race just added a third serious front.