Bristol-Myers Squibb unveiled a deal with Anthropic on Wednesday that will give access to the AI company's Claude model to a workforce of more than 30,000, targeting faster progress in finding, developing, and delivering new medicines.
The biopharma company will use the AI model across research, drug development, manufacturing, and commercial and medical affairs
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Bristol-Myers Squibb unveiled a deal with Anthropic on Wednesday that will give access to the AI company's Claude model to a workforce of more than 30,000, targeting faster progress in finding, developing, and delivering new medicines.
As part of the arrangement, Bristol-Myers Squibb is deploying Claude Code — Anthropic's tool aimed at developers — to accelerate how quickly its engineering and AI teams can work. The company is also exploring how Claude AI agents might be applied across research and drug development, manufacturing, and commercial and medical affairs.
Greg Meyers, Bristol-Myers Squibb's chief digital and technology officer, said the company's goal is to connect its various data sources through a common AI layer. "A lot of it is us avoiding having to build basic infrastructure tooling, so that we can really focus on the use cases that are going to bring more medicines to more patients faster," Meyers told The Wall Street Journal.
One application already in use involves Claude writing regulatory reports based on the company's clinical trial data. That requires the AI to understand Bristol-Myers Squibb's regulatory strategy and the style of its existing regulatory documents.
For Anthropic, the deal reflects a deliberate push into life sciences. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic's head of life sciences, described the sector as a "significant investment area" for the company. Anthropic launched a dedicated product called Claude for Life Sciences in Oct. of last year. "It's not just about using AI to design new drugs, or not just about using AI to make clinical trials go faster, but really using AI end-to-end through every part of the process of operating a life science organization," Kauderer-Abrams told The Wall Street Journal.
The deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb comes as Anthropic has been expanding its enterprise push across industries. The company announced a partnership with KPMG and released a set of AI agent templates for financial services firms earlier this week, with Goldman Sachs $GS, Citi, Visa $V, and AIG among the companies that have adopted Claude. Anthropic rival OpenAI has also pursued life sciences partnerships, including agreements with Moderna $MRNA and Novo Nordisk.
Despite billions of dollars being poured into AI deals across the pharmaceutical industry, the Wall Street Journal noted that tangible, broad-based results from those investments remain unproven.
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