“Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organization,” Novo CEO Mike Doustdar said in a statement.
Novo also plans to apply Anthropic’s frontier models to software engineering, part of an effort to expand AI use across the company. The drugmaker said the collaboration could support scientific reasoning in R&D as well as agentic software development.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The Anthropic partnership adds another major AI provider to Novo’s technology strategy. In April, the company announced a separate collaboration with OpenAI aimed at bringing AI tools into multiple parts of its operations.
Other pharmaceutical companies have been building similar relationships with AI and computing companies. Bristol Myers Squibb previously announced an Anthropic partnership that would give Claude access to the company’s institutional knowledge, while Bristol Myers, Eli Lilly and Roche have also announced collaborations with Nvidia around AI computing infrastructure.
Merck & Co., Takeda and Lilly have separately entered AI-focused agreements with Google Cloud, Iambic Therapeutics and Insilico Medicine, respectively. Some of those partnerships could be worth $1 billion or more.
The growing investment reflects pharmaceutical companies’ interest in using AI to improve how potential drugs are identified, evaluated and developed. At the same time, the technology still carries limitations. Large language models can produce incorrect outputs, and some researchers have cautioned that expectations for AI in drug development are running ahead of the benefits demonstrated so far.
Novo addressed those concerns by emphasizing controls around how the technology will be used.
“The collaboration has been designed with robust data governance and human oversight, helping ensure AI is applied responsibly and in line with Novo’s ethical and compliance standards,” the company said.
For Novo, the Anthropic deal extends an AI strategy that now spans multiple technology partners while putting Claude directly into scientific and software workflows inside the drugmaker.
This analysis is based on reporting from Biopharma Dive.
Image courtesy of R&D World.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
