Summary
Anthropic says its AI for Science program is expanding to 20 scientific foundations, institutions and research groups, with free Claude credits for researchers. The announcement includes support for research initiatives and collaborations on laboratory tools and scientific data.
Anthropic says it is expanding its AI for Science program through partnerships involving 20 scientific foundations, institutions and research groups. The program provides free Claude credits to researchers working on high-impact scientific projects, with funders distributing credits to researchers and participating institutions making them available within their organisations.
The announcement marks a shift from a programme that began by supporting individual scientists toward collaborations with research organisations and specific initiatives. Anthropic says many of the partnerships are in early stages.
Credits for funders, institutions and research projects
The science funders and societies named include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, the Open Source for Science Fund, the US National Science Foundation and CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society. They are expected to distribute Claude credits to researchers pursuing scientific work.
Institutional partners include the Space Telescope Science Institute, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Francis Crick Institute, Imperial College London’s Department of Life Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Gladstone Institutes. These organisations will use credits within their institutions to support research.
Anthropic also listed six initiatives receiving direct support: FlyWire at Princeton University, which develops open data and tools for studying neural connections; LEAP at Columbia University, which combines machine learning and physics for climate modelling; and AstroPath, which applies methods from astronomical surveys to tumour imaging. The other named projects are gnomAD, a human genetic-variation database; Tau Ceti, an open project building a machine-checkable mathematics library in Lean; and the Centre for Population Genomics, which works to broaden representation in genomic resources and develop rare-disease diagnosis tools.
From AI access to shared research tools
Anthropic describes scientists using Claude to generate hypotheses, design experiments, analyse complex data and communicate findings. Those are reported uses of the tool, rather than results from a study evaluating its effect on scientific productivity.
The company also points to collaborations begun over the past year. With HHMI Janelia Research Campus, it is developing the Model Hardware Standard, a shared specification intended to let AI agents operate laboratory instruments safely; the standard is currently in research preview. Anthropic says the Allen Institute is building teams of AI agents to analyse its scientific datasets, with the aim of compressing work that can take months into hours.
A potential broader benefit is the creation of resources other researchers can reuse. Anthropic says some collaborations are expected to produce public goods such as open datasets, open-source software, open standards and shared libraries. The announcement describes these as anticipated outputs, while noting that many projects are still at an early stage. Anthropic says it plans to share the impact of the work as the collaborations develop.