Anthropic is launching partnerships with two leading research organizations to bring its Claude AI model into biological research. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Allen Institute will serve as founding partners, aiming to integrate Claude’s capabilities into experimental planning, data analysis, and scientific discovery. These collaborations seek to address a central challenge in modern biology: translating large-scale data into actionable, validated insights.
The partnerships combine Anthropic’s expertise in foundation models, agentic AI systems, and interpretability with world-class experimental research. By embedding AI into everyday scientific workflows, researchers can accelerate knowledge synthesis, hypothesis generation, and experimental interpretation, while maintaining human oversight and judgment.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: AI for Laboratory Discovery
HHMI will focus on developing specialized AI agents that integrate with experimental tools and data pipelines at its Janelia Research Campus. These agents will serve as comprehensive knowledge assistants, helping scientists design experiments, interpret results, and navigate complex datasets.
The collaboration is part of HHMI’s AI@HHMI initiative, which has been exploring AI applications in protein design, neural circuitry analysis, and other advanced research areas. Working with Anthropic, HHMI aims to ensure AI models evolve in response to real experimental needs, improving both the accuracy and usability of AI in laboratory contexts.
Allen Institute: Multi-Agent Systems for Data Integration
The Allen Institute will explore multi-agent AI systems to support mechanistic discovery across its research programs. These systems will handle multi-omic data integration, knowledge graph management, temporal modeling, and experimental planning.
By coordinating multiple specialized AI agents, the collaboration aims to compress months of manual data analysis into hours while highlighting patterns and insights that might otherwise be overlooked. The systems are designed to enhance human intuition rather than replace it, keeping researchers in control of the scientific direction.
Advancing Scientific AI
Both partnerships emphasize transparency, interpretability, and evidence-based AI reasoning. Claude’s role is to augment human researchers, providing insights that can be rigorously evaluated and built upon.
Through these collaborations, Anthropic will refine Claude’s capabilities for life sciences, providing lessons for AI deployment across diverse research contexts. The initiative adds to a growing track record of Claude assisting in high-stakes scientific applications, including its recent use by NASA to plan routes for the Perseverance rover on Mars – the first instance of AI-generated commands guiding a planetary rover.
