“It represents how important this is to our mission that this is right up there with Claude Code and Claude Cowork as the next really significant product that we’re releasing,” says Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences. “Our mission is to develop AI that serves humanity’s long-term well-being, and we believe that by far the greatest opportunity to do that is in the life sciences.”

For the past decade, one company—Google DeepMind—has been at the vanguard of AI for science. CEO Demis Hassabis and researcher John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on the company’s AlphaFold model, and DeepMind has also made major contributions to meteorology, materials science, and a variety of other disciplines. But in the past several months, the fast-advancing frontier of AI progress seems to have left DeepMind in the dust. When it comes to coding, which has become the most lucrative use case for LLMs, DeepMind is stuck playing catch-up.

Anthropic is well positioned to take up DeepMind’s scientific mantle. Like Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a PhD scientist—unlike OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who’s a businessman through and through. Many scientists are already avid users of tools such as Claude Code. These days, a lot of scientific research involves some amount of coding, but not all scientists are expert software engineers, and so tools like Claude Code can make a huge difference for their productivity. And the company has recently earned a major scientific vote of confidence: Earlier this month, Jumper announced that he is leaving DeepMind for Anthropic.

Since agents powered by LLMs, including Anthropic’s Opus model series, became capable of useful, independent work in late 2025, scientists have been seeing just how much they can do. In a blog post published on Anthropic’s website, the Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz estimated, on the basis of his work with Claude Code and other Anthropic tools, that the company’s Opus 4.5 model is about as capable of executing scientific projects as a second-year graduate student.

According to Kauderer-Abrams, Claude Science isn’t intended to displace Claude Code and Claude Cowork in scientists’ workflows. Instead, it’s designed to build on what scientists already find useful about Anthropic’s products. For instance, it not only writes code but also helps scientists run their code on powerful computer clusters, which many many scientists need for their work but can be difficult to manage. And it prioritizes reproducibility, so that scientists can trace back the source of any figure or result and check it for accuracy and validity.