Novo Nordisk Taps Anthropic’s Claude to Speed Drug Discovery

Novo Nordisk and Anthropic announced a collaboration on September 16, 2026, under which the drugmaker will use Anthropic’s frontier AI models and test the Claude Science workbench in specific research and development workflows, with the stated goal of accelerating the discovery and development of new medicines.

Collaboration Scope and Governance

In the announcement, datelined Bagsværd, Denmark, the companies said they will jointly address key drug discovery challenges identified by scientists and computational teams at Novo Nordisk and develop targeted solutions for specific scientific challenges and workflows to support biological reasoning. As an initial aim, Novo Nordisk will test Claude Science for specific R&D workflows, focusing on scientific problems where the companies’ joint capabilities are expected to have the greatest impact.

Novo Nordisk will also use Anthropic’s frontier models to strengthen AI-driven software development, described in the release as a key enabler for scaling AI across the company. The company stated that the collaboration was designed with robust data governance and human oversight, helping ensure AI is applied responsibly and in line with its ethical and compliance standards.

Mike Doustdar, Novo Nordisk’s president and CEO, framed the deal as part of a broader push, calling the partnership another testament to the company’s ambition to become the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company and pointing to existing AI initiatives with other technology partners. “Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organisation and help us on our mission to bring new, transformative health solutions to people living with chronic diseases,” Doustdar said. He added that AI can increase productivity in R&D, compress the path from research to marketed product, and offer new scientific opportunities that aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, said the collaboration is built to give leading researchers access to frontier models. “AI’s increasing capability brings with it the potential to compress a century’s worth of biological and medical breakthroughs into a decade,” Amodei said. He said that giving such researchers safe, capable, and trusted frontier models can shorten research timelines, improve outcomes, and discover medicines and treatments that significantly improve human life.

The Claude Science Workbench

Anthropic introduced Claude Science on June 30, 2026, describing it as an AI workbench for scientists and releasing it in beta. According to Anthropic’s product page, Claude Science is a public beta application rather than a new model: it runs the same Claude models included in a user’s plan and adds scientific tools, database connections, and compute integrations around them.

In Anthropic’s description, users interact with a generalist coordinating agent that has access to more than 60 curated skills and connectors pre-configured for genomics, single-cell analysis, proteomics, structural biology, and cheminformatics, and these agents can spin up additional agents and engage specialist agents created by users. A reviewer agent checks citations and calculations, flagging and correcting errors. Every output carries an auditable history — the exact code, the environment, a plain-language description of what was done, and the full message history — so results can be validated and reproduced later. The app runs on the user’s own infrastructure, whether a laptop, a Linux machine, or a high-performance computing login node, so large or sensitive datasets do not have to leave existing systems.

Claude Science is available in beta on macOS, Windows, and Linux for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans; Team and Enterprise users need an administrator to enable it. Anthropic says the app connects natively to more than 60 scientific databases and uses skills from NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit to reach life sciences models and libraries including Evo 2, Boltz-2, and OpenFold3.

Novo Nordisk’s Existing Claude Deployment

Novo Nordisk already works with Claude, according to an Anthropic case study describing the drugmaker’s existing deployment. The case study states that Novo Nordisk built NovoScribe, an AI-powered documentation platform developed with Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock and MongoDB Atlas, which pairs retrieval-augmented generation with domain expert-approved text and case-specific variables to produce regulatory documentation.

Anthropic reports in the case study that the time spent producing clinical study documentation fell from more than ten weeks to ten minutes, and that the resources needed to create device verification protocols dropped by 95%. A clinical study report, the document that summarizes a drug trial’s results, can run up to 300 pages, and staff writers previously averaged 2.3 such reports per year. Waheed Jowiya, Novo Nordisk’s Digitalization Strategy Director, said in the case study that Claude helped cut writing times on clinical study reports by 90%, moving documentation more quickly into human review and approval.

The case study describes an 11-person development team in which non-technical members, including Jowiya, use Claude Code to prototype ideas in natural language. NovoScribe’s scope has expanded from clinical study reports to device protocol documentation and patient materials, and the case study says Novo Nordisk’s goal is to automate the process of producing full Common Technical Documents, the comprehensive regulatory submissions required for drug approval, with pilots of Claude underway in medical affairs.