Anthropic Launches Claude for Healthcare One Week After OpenAI

Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare on January 11 at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, introducing HIPAA-ready enterprise tools and consumer health record access a few days after OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health debut.

The timing is not coincidental. Both AI labs are racing to capture the healthcare market, where the combination of high-stakes decision-making and massive data volumes creates significant revenue potential. Anthropic’s announcement positions Claude as a direct competitor in a vertical OpenAI had just staked out.

Claude for Healthcare includes models trained specifically for medical tasks, native integrations with industry databases like the CMS Coverage Database and ICD-10 codes, and HIPAA-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers. Early adopters include Banner Health, Stanford Healthcare, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, AbbVie, and Genmab.

Consumer Health Records Come to Claude

The consumer-facing features mark Anthropic’s most significant move into personal health data. Pro and Max subscribers in the US can now connect health records through a partnership with HealthEx, a startup that consolidates medical records from over 50,000 health systems.

The integration uses Model Context Protocol—the open standard Anthropic developed for connecting AI to external data—to securely retrieve relevant portions of a user’s medical history. Rather than pulling entire records, Claude requests only the categories most relevant to each question: medications, allergies, recent lab reports, or doctor notes.

Apple Health and Android Health Connect integrations are rolling out in beta this week via Claude’s mobile apps. Health data shared with Claude is excluded from the model’s memory and will not be used for training future systems. Users can disconnect or edit permissions at any time.

“When connected, Claude can summarize users’ medical history, explain test results in plain language, detect patterns across fitness and health metrics, and prepare questions for appointments,” Anthropic stated. The aim is making patient-doctor conversations more productive.

Enterprise Tools Target Administrative Burden

For health systems and payers, Claude for Healthcare addresses the administrative work that consumes significant clinical resources. Use cases include prior authorization review, claims appeals support, sorting patient portal messages, and care coordination tasks like managing referrals.

Anthropic added connectors to industry-standard databases including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Coverage Database, the National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed. For life sciences companies, new connectors include Medidata for clinical trial data and ClinicalTrials.gov, plus bioRxiv and medRxiv for research papers.

Microsoft announced that Claude in Microsoft Foundry now includes healthcare-specific tools, connectors, and skills for enterprise customers. The integration brings Claude’s reasoning capabilities to healthcare organizations already using Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

The technical foundation is Claude Opus 4.5. Anthropic claims the model performs better on medical tasks and produces fewer errors than previous versions.

Safety Requirements Remain Strict

Despite the healthcare branding, Anthropic maintains explicit limitations. The company’s acceptable use policy requires that “a qualified professional must review the content or decision prior to dissemination or finalization” when Claude is used for healthcare decisions, medical diagnosis, patient care, or therapy.

“We’re not claiming that you can completely remove the human from the loop,” Anthropic stated. The emphasis on human oversight distinguishes Claude for Healthcare from autonomous diagnostic tools—it’s designed to support clinicians, not replace them.

This positioning mirrors OpenAI’s approach with ChatGPT Health, which similarly disclaims diagnostic capabilities. Both companies are threading a needle: capturing healthcare revenue while avoiding the regulatory and liability exposure that would come with positioning AI as a medical device.

The Healthcare AI Race Heats Up

The back-to-back launches reflect how valuable healthcare has become for AI companies. Medical queries represent some of the most engaged use cases for chatbots, and enterprise healthcare contracts can reach into millions of dollars annually.

Anthropic’s announcement comes as the company approaches a $350 billion valuation in its latest funding round. Claude Code already generates $1 billion in annualized revenue. Healthcare represents another vertical where Anthropic can build specialized products on top of its foundation models.

The competitive dynamics favor patients and health systems in the short term. Two well-funded AI labs racing to serve healthcare means more features, better integrations, and pressure to demonstrate safety and accuracy. Whether that competition produces tools that genuinely improve health outcomes—or simply more sophisticated ways to summarize lab results—remains to be seen.

For now, both Claude for Healthcare and ChatGPT Health are available to US subscribers, with enterprise offerings targeting health systems globally. The healthcare AI market has two serious contenders, and both are moving fast.