Novartis CEO joins board of "responsible" AI firm Anthropic
Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan.
In another signal of the deepening relationship between the pharma and AI sectors, Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan has been appointed to the board of Anthropic.
Narasimhan, who has been at the helm of the Swiss pharma group since 2017, "shares Anthropic's conviction that healthcare and life sciences are among the areas where AI has the greatest potential to improve the quality of human life," said the AI company in a statement.
Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, pointed to Narasimhan's deep experience in overseeing the development if approval of more than 35 medicines, saying: "Getting powerful new technology to people safely and at scale is what we think about every day at Anthropic. Vas has been doing exactly that for years, and I'm grateful he's joining us."
Narasimhan's appointment comes shortly after Anthropic accelerated its move into the application of AI to drug discovery by acquiring New York start-up Coefficient Bio for a reported $400 million, laying claim to a platform for target and drug discovery, as well as navigating regulatory requirements for development projects.
Last year, the AI heavyweight also launched Claude for Life Sciences, a group of large language models (LLMs) and an AI assistant designed to help researchers with tasks like writing code for statistical analysis, summarising papers, and generating testable hypotheses.
Novartis, meanwhile, has been steadily building its capabilities in AI through partnerships with Microsoft, Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, Relation Therapeutics, and others.
In a LinkedIn post, Narasimhan emphasised Anthropic's responsible and ethical approach to AI, a stance that cost it a relationship with the Trump administration earlier this year when it refused to allow unfettered use of Claude for mass surveillance purposes and the development of autonomous weaponry. That led to Anthropic being declared a "supply chain risk" by the Pentagon, while Trump instructed all federal agencies not to use its technologies.
"Working across medicine, innovation, and global health has helped me realise that technology creates the most value when it's deployed responsibly," wrote Narasimhan in the post.
"In healthcare, AI is already accelerating some of our hardest scientific challenges – from deepening our understanding of disease biology to helping identify promising targets and design better medicines. But speed alone isn't the goal. What matters just as much is how these tools are built, governed, and ultimately applied in the real world," he added.
"Anthropic is demonstrating that AI can be both transformative and responsible. I'm looking forward to contributing to its mission and to helping shape what the future of AI should look like."
Narasimhan was appointed to Anthropic's board by the company's Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent body with no financial stake in the business and has been tasked with striking a balance between ethics and financial success.
"Vas has spent his career stewarding breakthrough science responsibly – exactly the perspective we are excited to have on the board as we develop consequential technology," said Trust chair Neil "Buddy" Shah, CEO and co-founder at data analytics and development consulting firm IDinsight.
