Summary
Anthropic says WHO Africa teams are using Claude to compile Ebola situation reports in under an hour and to support outbreak modelling, vaccine-development coordination and viral-genome analysis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The company describes these tools as support for work led by public-health and scientific teams.
Anthropic says public-health teams responding to the Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are using Claude to prepare situation reports, run disease models and assist with vaccine-development and genomic research. In one workflow developed by WHO Africa staff, a report that previously took all day to assemble can now be prepared in under an hour, according to the company.
The situation report reproduced in Anthropic’s account is dated 19 September 2026. It records 58 new confirmed cases and 23 deaths in the preceding 24 hours, and totals of 7,672 confirmed cases and 3,699 deaths since the outbreak began. The outbreak had affected seven provinces and 63 of 167 health zones, with Ituri accounting for 77.1% of cases in that report.
The work is part of a partnership convened by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), involving the WHO Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO), the DRC’s Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB) and Anthropic teams.
From field notes to situation reports
Community health workers record fevers, recoveries and deaths during home visits, then send information to local managers. Health facilities also pass case data to districts, often through WhatsApp, while samples go to laboratories. District teams compile information into slide decks that feed into the situation report, or sitrep, used by response teams to track the outbreak and allocate resources.
WHO AFRO data staff built a Claude skill to extract case and laboratory figures from those PowerPoint decks, compare them with the previous day’s report, flag changes in trends and summarise district updates. Anthropic says this has shortened sitrep preparation from a full day to under an hour.
The WHO AFRO team is also using Claude to run multiple disease models and build forecasts. These can help logistics staff consider where treatment centres may be needed. Forecasts are one input to planning; the source account does not describe a measure of their accuracy.
Supporting vaccine and genome work
There is no approved vaccine for Bundibugyo ebolavirus, although Ervebo is a vaccine for the Zaire strain. CEPI used Claude to create a dashboard for tracking work needed to advance vaccine development. It has also used the tool to organise complex data relevant to proposals studying whether Ervebo may have cross-reactivity against Bundibugyo ebolavirus. CEPI’s research lead said that selecting which sample cohorts to analyse remains a scientific decision made by experts; Claude helps arrange the information for comparison.
Anthropic also describes use of Claude Science, its workbench for scientists, in genomic analysis at INRB. Sequencing machines produce millions of short genetic fragments, which must be assembled to analyse a virus’s genome. The company says Claude Science can take plain-language prompts to help assemble genomes and build a virus family tree. Such analyses can help researchers trace links between infections and examine how a virus is changing.
The examples place AI in data-processing and analysis tasks within a response led by health workers, laboratories and scientific teams. The outbreak’s immediate decisions—from finding patients to judging vaccine evidence—remain part of that expert-led work.