Anthropic launches Claude Science and a neglected-disease drug program

Anthropic released Claude Science on June 30, 2026 as a beta for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users. It is an app, not a new model. It runs Claude on a lab's own laptop, Linux box, or cluster, and only sends the slice of data each step needs. The company called it the biggest expansion of a life-sciences push it started the previous fall.

At the same San Francisco event, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic's head of life sciences, said the company will run its own discovery work on neglected diseases, targets traditional drugmakers do not find attractive. "We need to live it along with all of you," he said. A spokesperson told CNBC that as a public benefit company Anthropic can pick programs on patient benefit, including work the commercial market overlooks, and that it was at the start.

What is Claude Science?

Scientific work is usually a pile of tools. A researcher jumps from PubMed to Jupyter to R to a cluster terminal, each database with its own format. Claude Science puts that stack in one session: more than 60 connectors for genomics, single-cell work, proteomics, structural biology, and chemistry, plus a reviewer agent that checks citations and calculations.

It draws figures and 3D protein structures with the code that made them, so someone else can rerun the result months later. Big jobs, folding a protein or running a genomics pipeline, can go to the lab's own HPC cluster or to on-demand GPUs. Anthropic says the app asks before it reaches new machines. It also plugs into NVIDIA's BioNeMo tools, including Evo 2, Boltz-2, and OpenFold3.

John Jumper, who co-created AlphaFold and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, had joined Anthropic from Google DeepMind two weeks earlier. Claude Science is not a replacement for AlphaFold. It is a place to run tools like that next to Claude.

Who can get it, and what does it cost?

The beta is on macOS and Linux for people already on paid Claude plans. There is no extra sticker price in the announcement. Academic and nonprofit labs get discounted Team seats. Anthropic also offered up to $30,000 in credits for 50 science projects, plus up to $2,000 of compute from Modal on some of them, with applications due July 15.

If you use the free Claude site or ChatGPT, this does not appear. If you are a scientist on Pro or Max, you can try it. If you are on a Team or Enterprise plan, your admin has to switch it on.

What about the drug program?

That is a separate bet, announced in the room rather than in the product post. Anthropic wants to build tools for drugmakers by doing some of the same work itself, starting with diseases the commercial market skips. Jonah Cool, who runs life-sciences partnerships, framed it as sitting alongside the companies Anthropic is trying to sell Claude Science to.

In August, Anthropic published a campaign in which Claude designed protein binders that two outside labs then confirmed. That later result is what the June launch was aiming at: an agent that can run the early, computational slice of a discovery program.

What is still unknown

Kauderer-Abrams did not say what Anthropic would do with a promising candidate. CNBC noted that a traditional drugmaker would take one into clinical trials. No disease names, no budget, and no staffing figure were given. Claude Science is a beta, and the credit program closed in mid-July.