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.

Chinese AI companies are pushing to ship major model updates ahead of the Chinese New Year holiday. Zhipu AI and Minimax, both of which recently went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange, plan to release updates to their flagship models within the next two weeks, according to the South China Morning Post. Zhipu AI is reportedly working on GLM-5, a follow-up to GLM-4.7, with improvements in creative writing, programming, and logical reasoning. Minimax is preparing M2.2, which focuses on parallel programming capabilities. Throughout 2025, Chinese companies have increasingly challenged the dominance of major US AI players.

Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Baidu have all recently unveiled their most powerful models: Qwen3-Max-Thinking, Kimi K2.5, and Ernie 5.0. Deepseek, however, is apparently only planning a smaller update this year - according to a source, the company's next major model will be a trillion-parameter system, and training has been delayed due to its growing size. Meanwhile, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba are pouring billions of yuan into holiday advertising campaigns for their already popular AI chatbots.