Anthropic joins Gates Foundation on $200m health AI pledge

AI company Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have said they will provide $200 million in funding for a programme to support the development of AI for "health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility" over the next four years.

In health and life sciences, the focus is on developing tools that can improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where 4.6 billion people lack access to health services, to support the development of new vaccines and therapeutics, and help governments use health data to inform policy decisions.

The programme will be able to draw support from Anthropic in terms of access to technical staff and usage credits for its Claude AI platform – accounting for around half the value of its commitment – while the Gates Foundation will provide funding and help direct where the funding should be allocated.

Anthropic will also develop 'connectors', which grant Claude direct access to other platforms and tools, along with benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks that will "allow researchers, developers, and governments to better understand how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks."

In a statement, the Gates Foundation said AI remains out of reach for billions of people around the world, with many of the most powerful models remaining "concentrated among those with the most resources," and closing that gap "requires designing with equity as the goal." Any tools generated by the effort will be made freely available.

Anthropic, meanwhile, said it sees the commitment as central to its efforts to "extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not."

Specific projects envisioned by the partners include using Claude to ramp up research on high-burden and neglected diseases, exploring how AI can make it faster and easier for scientists to screen potential vaccine candidates and potential drugs for HPV and preeclampsia, and a partnership with the Gates Foundation's the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) to improve the forecasts that determine where and how treatments for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are deployed.

The company has made expanding its operations into the healthcare and life sciences sectors a priority, which was strengthened a few weeks ago when it appointed Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan to its board.

It has also cemented its position in AI-powered drug discovery with the recent acquisition of Coefficient Bio, while several pharma companies – including Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, Sanofi, AbbVie, and Genmab – are using Claude for Life Sciences in their business operations.

Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation also announced a $50 million alliance with OpenAI to support country-led efforts – called Horizon1000 and starting in Rwanda – to explore how AI tools can help reduce the burden on clinicians, improve quality of care, and reach more patients.

The goal is to reach 1,000 primary healthcare clinics and their surrounding communities by 2028.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash