tech
January 15, 2026
How scientists are using Claude to accelerate research and discovery
Last October we launched Claude for Life Sciences—a suite of connectors and skills that made Claude a better scientific collaborator. Since then, we've invested heavily in making Claude the most capable model for scientific work, with Opus 4.5 showing significant improvements in figure interpretation, computational biology, and protein understanding benchmarks. These advances, informed by working closely with researchers in academia and industry, reflect our commitment to understanding exactly how scientists are using AI to accelerate progress.
TL;DR
- Claude for Life Sciences enhances AI's role in scientific collaboration, with recent improvements in areas like figure interpretation and protein understanding.
- The AI for Science program provides free API credits to researchers, fostering innovation in AI-driven scientific projects.
- Biomni, an AI platform from Stanford, integrates hundreds of tools and databases, allowing for rapid hypothesis generation, experimental design, and data analysis in biology.
- In a trial, Biomni completed a genome-wide association study analysis in 20 minutes, a task typically taking months, and has been validated against expert performance.
- The Cheeseman lab uses MozzareLLM, powered by Claude, to automate the interpretation of large-scale gene knockout experiments, significantly accelerating discovery and identifying findings missed by human experts.
- The Lundberg Lab is testing an AI-led approach to hypothesis generation, using Claude to identify candidate genes for study based on molecular properties, potentially improving the efficiency and effectiveness of focused screening experiments.
- As AI models become more capable, they are increasingly replicating the work described in research papers, moving beyond basic tasks like coding and summarization.
- The effectiveness of these AI tools is growing in parallel with advancements in AI model capabilities.