Novo Nordisk partners with Anthropic to accelerate drug discovery

Novo, the pharmaceutical giant formerly known as Novo Nordisk, has signed a strategic partnership with AI company Anthropic to speed up its drug discovery and development pipeline. The collaboration, announced on September 16, will put Anthropic’s Claude models and the Claude Science workbench directly into the hands of Novo’s research scientists. The deal is the latest in a series of AI bets by the Danish drugmaker, which has stated its ambition to become the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company. What the partnership actually looks like The initial phase of the collaboration will focus on piloting Claude Science in targeted drug discovery workflows. Novo’s scientists will identify particular R&D challenges, then deploy Anthropic’s tools against them. The company made a point of emphasizing that data governance and human oversight remain central to the process. “This partnership will supercharge our R&D organization,” said Novo CEO Mike Doustdar. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered an even more ambitious framing, suggesting AI could “compress a century’s worth of breakthroughs into a decade.” Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed. Why Novo is going all-i...