Bristol Myers Squibb is rolling out Anthropic's Claude AI to speed up drug discovery. The pharmaceutical giant will use the large language model to analyze research data and identify potential drug candidates more quickly than traditional methods allow.
What Claude brings to the lab
Claude is a generative AI system developed by Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company focused on building safe and interpretable models. For BMS, the AI will handle tasks like reviewing scientific literature, predicting molecular properties, and suggesting new compounds. The company hasn't detailed which specific disease areas it will target first, but the move signals a growing bet on AI in early-stage research.
Why drug discovery needs a boost
Getting a new drug from initial idea to pharmacy shelf typically takes more than a decade and costs over $2 billion. Most candidates fail in clinical trials. AI tools like Claude promise to shorten that timeline by sifting through massive datasets — genomic sequences, protein structures, past trial results — to find patterns human researchers might miss. BMS already uses other computational tools, but Claude adds a conversational interface that lets scientists ask questions in plain language and get answers drawn from the company's internal data.
Anthropic's pharma push
The deal is one of the first major pharmaceutical deployments for Anthropic, which competes with OpenAI and Google. Claude has been used in finance, legal, and customer service settings, but drug discovery demands higher accuracy and explainability. BMS has not disclosed financial terms or the length of the agreement.
For now, the AI will work alongside BMS researchers, not replace them. The goal is to cut the time spent on literature reviews and hypothesis generation, letting scientists focus on experiments. Whether Claude can actually deliver faster breakthroughs remains an open question — the company hasn't said when it expects to see results.
