Anthropic and Danish Company behind Ozempic announce AI drug discovery collaboration

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is partnering with American artificial intelligence company Anthropic, aiming to use Anthropic’s Claude model to advance its drug discovery research and development.Novo, the developer of the popular weight loss drug Ozempic, announced the partnership on Wednesday, saying it will help the company in its mission to become “the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company.” The Danish company added that it would use Anthropic’s leading frontier models to aid its own software development, with the announcement coming during a week of debate over frontier AI in the United States, with Anthropic at the helm of the discussions. “This partnership is another testament to our ambition to become the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company, building on Novo’s current AI initiatives with other technology partners,” Mike Doustdar, president and CEO of Novo, said in a statement. “Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organization and help us on our mission to bring new, transformative health solutions to people living with chronic diseases.”Doustdar said Claude Science can help his company maximize research and development efficiency, create new breakthroughs, and gain a deeper understanding of pharmaceuticals and human biology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement on the partnership that his company’s AI model has the “potential to compress a century’s worth of biological and medical breakthroughs into a decade.”“By giving leading researchers access to safe, capable, and trusted frontier models, we can shorten research timelines, improve outcomes, and discover medicines and treatments that significantly improve human life,” Amodei said.Amodei’s launch into the pharmaceutical partnership comes as he has been in the AI spotlight in Washington, D.C., this week, after a former Anthropic researcher resigned from his role and warned that AI models could destroy humanity “by the end of the decade.”HOW A MANDATED ‘KILL SWITCH’ COULD HELP REGULATE AIAmodei responded to the warning and subsequent public concern by advocating a national slowdown of frontier AI development for the safety of humanity. Multiple AI leaders in the U.S., including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk, shared Amodei’s sentiment.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen supported the idea of AI companies putting the brakes on frontier development on Wednesday, arguing in her Wednesday State of the Union speech that “if the people developing the technology are clear, then we should be too.” On the topic of AI in healthcare, she said during her speech that “AI needs to empower our doctors. Not to replace them.”