Anthropic partners with leading research institutes to tackle biology's data bottleneck

Anthropic has announced two partnerships with major US research institutions to develop AI agents for biological research. The Allen Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will serve as founding partners in the initiative. According to Anthropic, "modern biological research generates data at unprecedented scale," but turning it into "validated biological insights remains a fundamental bottleneck." The company says manual processes "can't keep pace with the data being produced."

HHMI will develop specialized AI agents at the Janelia Research Campus that connect experimental knowledge to scientific instruments and analysis pipelines. The Allen Institute is working on multi-agent systems for data integration and experiment design that could "compress months of manual analysis into hours." According to Anthropic, these systems "are designed to amplify scientific intuition rather than replace it, keeping researchers in control of scientific direction while handling computational complexity."

The move extends Anthropic's push into scientific applications. The company recently launched Cowork, a feature designed for office work that gives Claude access to local files. OpenAI is also targeting the research market with Prism, an AI workspace for scientific writing.