Anthropic is announcing a major expansion of Claude into healthcare and life sciences, introducing HIPAA-ready tools, new medical data connectors, and agent capabilities designed for use across clinical care, healthcare operations, and regulated scientific workflows.

The announcement builds on Anthropic’s October launch of Claude for Life Sciences, which positioned Claude as a research partner for scientists and clinicians working in preclinical research and early development. That initial release focused primarily on supporting discovery-oriented tasks.

With this update, Anthropic is extending Claude’s role in two key ways. The company is launching Claude for Healthcare, a complementary offering that enables healthcare providers, payers, and patients to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products. At the same time, Anthropic is expanding Claude’s life sciences capabilities by connecting it to additional scientific platforms and supporting workflows that span clinical trial management, regulatory operations, and drug discovery.

Anthropic says these expansions are made possible by recent improvements in Claude’s underlying intelligence, particularly its performance on agent-based simulations of medical and scientific tasks. The focus, the company argues, is not conversational AI, but whether Claude can reliably execute complex, high-stakes tasks in real-world, regulated environments.

Anthropic says these product expansions are enabled by recent improvements in Claude’s general intelligence, particularly its performance on agent-based medical simulations that reflect real-world workflows.

According to Anthropic’s evaluations:

Anthropic also reports improved performance on internal honesty evaluations when Opus 4.5 is used with extended reasoning, reflecting progress in reducing factual hallucinations.

The company frames these gains in practical terms. Anthropic says the improved agentic performance allows Claude to support real-world outcomes such as accelerating prior authorization reviews so patients can access life-saving care more quickly, assisting with care coordination to reduce administrative burden on clinicians, and supporting regulatory submissions so new drugs can reach the market faster.

Rather than treating benchmark performance as an abstract measure, Anthropic is positioning these results as indicators of whether Claude can reliably operate inside high-stakes, regulated healthcare and life sciences environments.

Evaluation notes: Claude 4.5 models were tested using extended reasoning (64k tokens) and native tool use. MedAgentBench is a Stanford-affiliated benchmark.

Claude for Healthcare is a new, complementary offering that allows healthcare organizations to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products.

At the core of the release are new connectors that allow Claude to securely access industry-standard healthcare systems and databases, reducing the time clinicians and administrators spend locating and cross-referencing information.

Claude can now connect to:

HIPAA-compliant organizations using Claude for Enterprise can also access existing healthcare-related connectors, including PubMed, which provides access to more than 35 million biomedical research articles for up-to-date literature reviews and clinical context.

Anthropic is also introducing two new agent skills designed to support common healthcare integration and administrative tasks.

With these tools, Anthropic is positioning Claude as an operational support layer designed to address some of the most time-consuming and error-prone healthcare workflows.

Anthropic is also expanding Claude’s role for individual users by introducing new health data integrations designed to help people better understand their personal health information and prepare for more informed conversations with clinicians.

In the United States, Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers can choose to give Claude secure access to their personal health data, including lab results and medical records.

When connected, Claude can:

Anthropic emphasizes that these integrations are opt-in, permission-controlled, and private by design. User health data is not used to train models, and Claude includes contextual disclaimers directing users to healthcare professionals for personalized guidance.

Following its initial focus on preclinical research and development — including bioinformatics work and the generation of scientific hypotheses and research protocols — Anthropic is extending Claude for Life Sciences into later stages of the drug development pipeline.

The expanded capabilities are designed to support clinical trial operations, regulatory workflows, and drug discovery, moving Claude beyond early research assistance and into areas where scientific, operational, and compliance requirements intersect.

Claude can now connect to:

These additions expand Claude’s existing integrations with Benchling, 10x Genomics, PubMed, BioRender, Synapse.org, and Wiley Scholar Gateway. Anthropic also notes that the Benchling connector is now available via Claude.ai on the web with single sign-on (SSO) access.

Anthropic is adding new agent skills designed to support scientific research, clinical development, and regulatory preparation across the life sciences.

With these tools, Claude can support:

Anthropic says organizations interested in Claude for Healthcare and the expanded Claude for Life Sciences capabilities can access documentation and tutorial resources outlining available connectors, agent skills, and supported workflows.

The new healthcare and life sciences connectors and agent skills are generally available to Claude subscribers across Pro, Max, Teams, and Enterprise plans, according to the company.

Organizations evaluating Claude for use in clinical, operational, or regulated environments can also contact Anthropic to discuss enterprise deployments and implementation options.

Q: What is Claude for Healthcare?
A: Claude for Healthcare is Anthropic’s HIPAA-ready deployment of Claude, designed for use by healthcare providers, payers, startups, and patients across clinical, administrative, and operational workflows.

Q: How does Anthropic address accuracy risks in healthcare AI?
A: Anthropic emphasizes agent-based task execution, extended reasoning, and explicit uncertainty handling, rather than summary-style responses. Claude is designed to reference source systems, acknowledge limitations, and defer to clinicians for medical decisions.

Q: What healthcare tasks can Claude support today?
A: Claude can assist with prior authorization reviews, claims appeals, care coordination, medical coding, clinical documentation support, and patient message triage in HIPAA-ready environments.

Q: How is Claude used in life sciences?
A: Claude for Life Sciences supports clinical trial protocol drafting, trial operations monitoring, regulatory submissions, bioinformatics workflows, and early drug discovery through secure data connectors and agent skills.

Q: Does Anthropic use patient health data to train its models?
A: No. Anthropic states that personal health data accessed through Claude is opt-in, permission-controlled, and not used to train models.

Anthropic’s expansion reflects a broader push to move AI in healthcare beyond experimentation and into operational systems where accuracy, compliance, and accountability matter.

The timing is notable. It comes as concerns grow around consumer-facing AI tools — particularly search-based AI summaries — surfacing incorrect or misleading health information without sufficient context, safeguards, or professional oversight. In healthcare, authoritative-sounding answers without traceability can introduce real risk.

Anthropic is positioning Claude differently. Rather than generating health answers at the top of search results, Claude is being embedded into structured workflows, connected directly to source systems, and designed to acknowledge uncertainty and defer to clinicians and regulators. This reflects an understanding that healthcare AI fails not because it lacks intelligence, but because it is often deployed without accountability.

By focusing on prior authorization, claims workflows, clinical trials, and regulatory submissions, Anthropic is framing Claude as infrastructure for high-stakes decision support rather than a standalone assistant. The emphasis on HIPAA-ready deployments, agent-based task execution, explicit uncertainty handling, and professional hand-offs suggests an attempt to align AI capabilities with the realities of regulated healthcare environments.

Even with these safeguards, Anthropic’s approach implicitly acknowledges that workflow-embedded AI still requires human oversight, particularly in clinical and regulatory settings where accountability ultimately rests with professionals, not systems.

For healthcare organizations and life sciences companies, the takeaway is less about AI novelty and more about whether these systems can reliably reduce administrative friction without introducing new risk — a test that will increasingly define enterprise AI adoption in medicine.

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.