Open call for guest investigators in the life sciences
Anthropic Anthropic
Anthropic is taking applications from life-science researchers for 8–12 week Claude projects. It’ll fund the work and open-source the results, but only if the project can show early evidence fast.
Based on reporting by Anthropic, Anthropic — read the original for the full story.
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Anthropic is opening the door to outside scientists who want to work with its models on life-science problems. The company is inviting principal investigators and their research groups from universities, nonprofits, and government labs to pitch special projects using Claude in areas like causal human biology, structural and computational molecular biology, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, and clinical science.
Selected guest investigators will spend 8 to 12 weeks working directly with Anthropic researchers on a problem they care about. The company says it will run the models and the supporting systems at no cost to the researchers, and the output is supposed to be practical: analyses, artifacts, and tools that Anthropic can actually use.
There’s also a publication angle. Anthropic says it will work with the guest investigators to publish the results and open-source the accompanying data and code. The researchers keep rights to their own data throughout the project, and they also keep rights to any independent follow-on research that grows out of the collaboration.
The company is asking applicants to make a clear case for why they need direct collaboration with Anthropic’s researchers, and to show that something useful can be produced in that short window. That might be preliminary discoveries, answers to open questions, open datasets, or public resources. Anthropic says some projects may be extended beyond the initial period, but it is not pretending these big scientific questions get solved in two months and a bit.
Applications should rely only on publicly available information, and Anthropic says it is not asking researchers to hand over their data either in the application or during the collaboration. The application window will stay open for about 14 days, and selected participants should hear back by email roughly 14 days after it closes. The program sits alongside Anthropic’s Life Sciences Verification Program and its AI for Science initiative, both of which are meant to give scientists more access to Claude.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sensible version of AI outreach: give researchers access, keep the data where it belongs, and demand something public at the end. The catch is the timeline, because life science loves slow validation and 8 to 12 weeks is barely enough time to warm up the lab coffee. Still, it’s better than the usual model-company theatre where everyone talks about science and nobody opens the door.
Read more about this at: Anthropic
