Anthropic starts developing medicines itself, buys a drug developer and works with Bristol Myers Squibb
The company behind Claude has acquired a small firm developing a treatment for rare muscular dystrophy and is working with six drug developers. The first clinical trials could come in late 2028 at the earliest.
Anthropic is moving from selling AI models to developing medicines itself. The company behind Claude said on Tuesday evening that it has acquired a small drug developer, started its own research programmes and spent several months working closely with six companies developing new medicines, among them Bristol Myers Squibb. The goal is to use Claude across the whole chain, from early idea to clinical trials.
The announcement came in a blog post dated 27 October and in a post from Anthropic's official X account at 21:27 Oslo time. Anthropic writes that it plans to scale this work up "substantially" from here.
Buying a one-person company and starting its own programmes
Anthropic has acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company that has been developing treatments for two rare forms of childhood muscular dystrophy. According to Anthropic, the founder used Claude to organise contracts, logistics and experiments with 11 external labs. The company took a possible treatment from idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months.
The founder is now continuing the research at Anthropic and plans to start several new programmes. If the candidates hold up, Anthropic expects a drug could be ready to start clinical trials in humans as soon as late 2028. The purchase price has not been disclosed.
Six partners, concrete numbers
Anthropic presents results from five of the partners, each with its own technical report:
- Generate Biomedicines used Claude Code to propose new designs for part of a CAR T-cell cancer therapy. One design was about 70 percent shorter than the standard version and, in lab tests, produced roughly ten times as many receptors on the immune cells.
- Divergence Labs had Claude generate roughly 35,000 antibody designs in about a month, largely autonomously, while working on a new food allergy treatment. Three of the designs appeared to outperform the standard medication in early tests.
- BigHat Biosciences tested about 1,010 variants in ten weeks based on Claude's proposals. The best bound more than ten times more tightly than the originals.
- Enveda had Claude review 1,061 pages of manufacturing documentation. Claude caught all 11 issues human reviewers had found, plus seven they had missed, and human review time fell by 89 percent. One regulatory document took four hours instead of about three months.
- The Column Group is setting up a company, Pleiades, that will use Claude to run more, and more complex, drug programmes than a small team usually can.
Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess plans for an early-stage drug in clinical trials and estimate the likelihood of those trials succeeding. The work is set to expand in 2027.
Still early days
Anthropic itself stresses that most of the work is preclinical, meaning the drugs have not yet been tested in humans. The results are the companies' own figures, and none of the medicines has been approved. The post does not say how much Anthropic is investing, how many staff work on drug development, or whether Anthropic will own the rights to medicines that come out of the programmes.
Anthropic also points to tools for a wider group of researchers: the Claude Science workbench, Claude credits for life scientists, and a verification programme that gives trusted organisations access to its most powerful models with more permissive safeguards for biological research.
What it means for leaders
The story shows where AI companies are looking for the big money: industries where every month saved is worth a lot. Anthropic is competing directly with OpenAI here, which on 20 October announced it would acquire Orchestra Bio, a company that makes software for managing drug development. The Enveda figures are the most transferable to other industries: quality control of documentation and regulatory drafts is work many companies have plenty of.
For companies in pharmaceuticals, biotech and health, it is worth noting that Anthropic is now both a supplier and a potential competitor. Anyone sharing data with a model provider that develops medicines itself should know what the agreement says about data use and ownership of results.
Sources and media
- Anthropic: Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude
- Anthropic on X about drug development with Claude
- OpenAI: OpenAI to acquire Orchestra Bio
The blog post is dated 27 October 2026, and Anthropic's post on X followed at 21:27 Oslo time the same day. All information in this article comes from these sources.
Illustration: AI-generated with Grok Bot / hogby.ai
