Scientists Use Anthropic's Claude to Speed Up Research

Anthropic has revealed how global research teams are leveraging its Claude models, particularly the updated Opus 4.5, to automate complex scientific workflows. To support this momentum, the company is offering free Claude access to 10,000 scientists. Under this initiative, verified principal investigators can access a Claude Team subscription and add their team members to Standard seats for free, or Premium seats for $15 per month, for up to a year. Anthropic is also launching a $5 million grant program to study AI's impact on wellbeing and opening a research preview of its Model Hardware Standard (MHS) to help AI agents safely operate physical laboratory devices.

Practitioners are already seeing massive efficiency gains through custom integrations. At Stanford University, researchers built Biomni, a Claude-powered agentic platform that automates tasks across more than 25 biological subfields. In trials, Biomni completed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in just 20 minutes, a process that typically takes humans months. The system also analyzed 450 wearable data files from 30 individuals in 35 minutes—a task estimated to take a human expert three weeks—and analyzed gene activity data from over 336,000 individual cells.

Other institutions are targeting specific research bottlenecks. At MIT's Cheeseman Lab, where focused screens can be highly labor-intensive, researchers developed MozzareLLM. This Claude-powered tool automates the interpretation of gene knockout experiments, helping principal investigator Iain Cheeseman—who can recall the function of about 5,000 genes off the top of his head—analyze massive datasets without manual bottlenecking. Meanwhile, Stanford's Lundberg Lab is using Claude to bypass the traditional $20,000 cost of focused genetic screens by using a molecular map to predict which genes to target, currently testing the system on primary cilia.

For scientific practitioners, these developments signal a shift from AI as a basic writing or coding assistant to an active, reasoning collaborator. By integrating Claude into custom pipelines, labs can compress experimental timelines from months to hours, identify overlooked biological patterns, and make highly informed decisions on where to allocate expensive laboratory resources.