Claude Science from Anthropic: AI tool for scientific research based on Opus 4.5

Claude Science from Anthropic: AI Tool for Scientific Research Based on Opus 4.5

Anthropic presented Claude Science on June 30, 2026 at a closed event for biopharmaceutical companies, biotech startups, and scientists — a new flagship product that supports scientific research in the same way Claude Code supports software development.

What Claude Science Can Do

Like Claude Code, Claude Science is capable of autonomously performing substantial work based on brief natural language instructions — without step-by-step control from a human. The product combines in one working environment tools, computational resources, and scientific databases necessary for multi-stage research processes.

• The announcement took place on June 30, 2026 at an event for biopharmaceutical representatives
• Runs on Claude Opus 4.5 model
• Connects to more than 60 scientific databases — UniProt, PDB, Ensembl, ChEMBL, ClinVar, GEO, and others
• Available to subscribers of Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans
• Anthropic will fund up to 50 "AI for Science" projects with grants up to $30,000 each for computing

The tool natively displays 3D protein structures, genomic tracks, and chemical formulas, and is capable of distributing computations between a laptop, HPC clusters, and GPU as needed. A separate reviewer agent checks citations and calculations, while results are saved as reproducible artifacts with full code history — this is critical for scientific publications, where experiments must be repeatable by other laboratories.

Claude Science runs locally on macOS and Linux or remotely — via SSH to computing clusters. For academic institutions and nonprofit organizations, Anthropic offers discounts on Team plan seats.

The Origins of Claude Science

The product grew from more narrowly focused Claude for Life Sciences plugins that Anthropic had released earlier for individual tasks in biology. Claude Science brings them together into a single standalone product with access to all tools at once, rather than one plugin at a time — the same logic by which Claude Code once grew from auxiliary functions into a separate flagship product for developers.

How Claude Science Resembles Claude Code

Both products are built on one idea: give the Claude model a high-level task and let it independently take the work to completion. Claude Code does this for programming, Claude Science — for computational biology and drug development: finding targets, analyzing genomic data, modeling protein structures.

Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz, one of the first users of the product, assessed the capabilities of the Claude Opus 4.5 model underlying it like this:

"Opus 4.5 is capable of executing scientific projects at roughly the

level of a second-year graduate student."

Beyond the product itself, Anthropic announced the launch of its own internal drug development program for "forgotten" diseases — those that do not receive sufficient attention from pharmaceutical companies due to low commercial appeal.

What This Means

Anthropric is betting not only on code but also on the laboratory: if Claude Code became a standard tool for developers, the company expects to repeat this success in science, accelerating routine but labor-intensive stages of research — from searching data across disparate databases to verifying the reproducibility of experiments.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Claude Science cost?

No separate charge is required — the product is included in existing paid subscriptions Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise.

What model does Claude Science run on?

Claude Opus 4.5. The product itself is not a separate model — it is a layer with access to scientific databases and computational resources.

What will scientists whose projects

Anthropic selects receive?

Up to 50 projects under the "AI for Science" direction will receive grants up to $30,000 for computing resources each, with partner Modal adding up to $2,000 for individual projects.