If Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei is right, AI will eventually be known more for the scientific breakthroughs it enables than the negative societal risks it introduces. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced what it's calling its "AI workbench for scientists," now dubbed Claude Science. The app launches in beta today and runs locally on Mac or Linux, or on a remote machine via SSH or an HPC login. It runs on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. Anthropic also launched a new team plan for research labs.
It's important to note that Claude Science uses all of the existing Anthropic models and does not introduce any new science-specific models like the one OpenAI has created with GPT-Rosalind. Instead, Claude Science is focused on a science-specific interface that brings together tools and capabilities that can accelerate the work of scientists, researchers, students, and labs. It also runs science-specific agents that are designed to automate some of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of research.
Anthropic said that Claude Science can run locally on a laboratory's own servers and doesn't need to run through the standard cloud-based Anthropic models. This is a key compromise since labs often run highly proprietary, valuable, and sensitive data that demand strong security, privacy, and data sovereignty.
Another one of the key issues Anthropic is trying to accomplish with Claude Science is the problem of scientific work being spread across a disconnected set of tools, databases, and computing environments, which creates friction and obstacles to achieving important breakthroughs.
In the livestream, the Anthropic team made the case that AI has completely transformed the work of software development, and that it can have a similar impact on life sciences. And that's where Claude Science will start, with the goal of "compressing timelines in biology."
Amodei has long championed the potential of accelerating scientific progress as one of AI's greatest opportunities to make a positive impact on civilization. Tuesday's announcement was introduced in a rare major public event for Anthropic and livestreamed on YouTube.
To stimulate use of its new science tools, Anthropic also launched a new AI for Science Program that will support up to 50 projects and provide $30,000 in Claude Science credits. This is aimed at nonprofits and academic institutions, which can apply online by July 15, with winners notified by July 31 and projects running from September 1 to December 1.
Our Deeper View #
The Deep View has covered the launch of Google's Gemini for Science and OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind model recently and the level of enthusiasm for the impact that AI could have on scientific discovery has bordered on hyperbolic. Anthropic's Claude Science launch matched that exuberance. Clearly, there's a ton of enthusiasm from both AI labs and scientific teams for how AI can streamline some of the most entrenched problems that bog down scientific research, especially in biology. It's reasonable that AI could assist with streamlining research and documentation. It also makes sense that it could allow scientific teams to model out more hypotheses and experiments simultaneously, as the head of Google Research Yossi Matias recently told me in an interview for The Deep View. But we should also keep in mind that biology and medical trials take a long time, sometimes up to a decade, to test on human subjects. And while AI might be able to simulate it, it's unlikely that it will accelerate those trials. And so we should be wary about any claims of AI dramatically accelerating the elimination of human disease or solving the problems of aging in the next few years.