Foreword

Life sciences organizations are at a turning point in their AI adoption journeys, and researchers on the ground are the ones responsible for putting this new technology to work.

Deloitte's 2026 Life Sciences Outlook (opens in new tab), a survey of 280 biopharma and medtech leaders, found that 78% expect AI to play a central role in driving major change this year—yet only 14% report full implementation of AI tools into daily workflows, with another 40% still working toward it. Anthropic's own internal research, drawn from interviews with researchers across chemistry, physics, biology, and computational fields, found that 91% of scientists want more AI in their research, while 79% named trust and reliability as their number-one barrier to adoption.

A biologist's day spans literature, experiment design, data wrangling, analysis, figures, and writing, but the tools span PubMed, Jupyter, R, a cluster terminal, scientific data renderers, spreadsheets, and more. The labs and R&D orgs pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most compute or the biggest bioinformatics teams, they're the ones who've collapsed the distance between a scientist's question and a defensible result. Everyone else is still paying a toil tax on every experiment, and the gap only compounds.

Claude Science (opens in new tab) (in beta) is Anthropic's answer to this problem: an application for every digital step of life science, built to run next to the scientist's data and produce results that can be traced, reproduced, and defended. It sits inside a broader Claude product family—including Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Claude for Microsoft 365, the Claude Platform, and Claude Managed Agents—that life sciences organizations like Novo Nordisk (opens in new tab), the Garvan Institute (opens in new tab), and Benchling (opens in new tab) use for the document, regulatory, and enterprise work that surrounds the science. This guide covers which surface to reach for when, then goes deep on deploying Claude Science inside a research organization, with customer examples and a rollout roadmap. Claude Science is intended for research use and is not designed for clinical or diagnostic decision-making. Items highlighted as being on Anthropic's roadmap are subject to change and do not represent a commitment.

Let's dive in.