Anthropic’s Claude is moving deeper into scientific research, with the AI model taking on tasks that have traditionally required scientists to spend hours or even weeks working through complex data.

In a blog post, Anthropic said Claude was able to design proteins from scratch and analyze chemistry data with limited human input. The company said the experiments show how AI could speed up parts of scientific research and reduce the amount of specialized expertise needed to get work done.

In one experiment, Anthropic asked Claude to design small proteins that could attach to specific targets. The company tested the system against 15 targets and found that it successfully produced working designs for 14 of them.

Claude generated 1,320 designs during the campaign, ultimately producing 354 working protein binders. Its overall success rate ranged from 22.6% to 35.1%, compared with a typical success rate of about 10% to 15% for protein-design campaigns, according to Anthropic.

The company said Claude carried out much of the process on its own. It selected where to design on each target, generated potential designs, ran them through other specialized models and screened the results before the designs were sent to outside laboratories for testing.

In one example, Claude achieved a 40% success rate when designing against a protein called RBX1, compared with a 3.7% success rate among participants in a previous protein-design competition. 

However, the model was not successful across the board, Claude struggled with some targets, including maltose-binding protein, where none of its 90 designs were confirmed to work.

Anthropic also tested Claude on a more routine scientific task: analyzing chemistry data. The company gave Claude Opus 5 raw files from two common laboratory instruments and asked it to process the information. Claude returned its analysis in 23 minutes for one set of data and 19 minutes for the other, without using the specialized software normally required for the task.

The results closely matched the laboratory’s own analysis. Claude measured the purity of a sample at 96.4%, compared with 96.33% in the lab’s results. Anthropic said this type of work can normally involve manual analysis and significant delays before a finished report is available. In the test, Claude processed both sets of data in parallel and produced a written report within about 25 minutes.

The results also highlight the limits and risks of increasingly capable AI systems, biological research capabilities can have both beneficial and harmful uses, including the potential to enable dangerous research. As a result, some of its most advanced biology capabilities remain unavailable for general access, the company noted.

Still, Anthropic sees the experiments as an early step toward using Claude across the drug-development process. The company said its broader goal is to have Claude eventually help with the development process from beginning to end.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously remarked that AI could help cure most human diseases within five to 10 years, while arguing that the industry must deliver real breakthroughs in medicine and biology rather than rely on optimistic messaging to win public trust.

Amodei made the comments in a post on X, responding to criticism that his public messaging around AI has been disproportionately focused on the technology’s risks. He said he views his messaging as roughly balanced between AI’s benefits and dangers, citing his writing on the technology’s potential to transform health and biology.

Photo Courtesy: Stockinq on Shutterstock.com