Bristol-Myers Squibb is the latest major pharmaceutical company to bet big on artificial intelligence, announcing a major agreement with Anthropic to deploy its AI tool, Claude, as a “shared intelligence platform” across its global operations.
This agreement puts Claude’s advanced reasoning and agent capabilities into the hands of more than 30,000 BMS employees.
While many of pharmaceutical companies’ early AI adoption focused on simple chatbots, BMS says this collaboration with humans signals a “meaningful evolution.” New Jersey pharmaceutical companies are now incorporating agent AI capabilities into daily workflows that drive drug research and development, manufacturing, and commercial operations.
“Most enterprise AI stops at chatbots,” Greg Myers, chief digital and technology officer at BMS, said in a May 20 statement. “The real value is the untapped value still locked behind decades of data silos, and this collaboration is how we get there. Claude at Anthropic gives us the agent capabilities, pace of innovation, and security we need to connect systems and put that collective knowledge into the hands of every BMS employee to accelerate innovation for patients.”
This development marks the continuation of more than three years of AI investment at BMS. The company released the first version of its AI chatbot in January 2023, shortly after OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted.
Going forward, BMS will deploy Anthropic’s developer tool, Claude Code, to accelerate internal software and AI development and “unlock data and expertise long locked in the disconnected systems that define today’s biopharmaceuticals,” the drug company said.
Regarding core workflows that advance medicines, BMS said it will evaluate the potential to apply Claude’s AI inference to BMS’ own research data to help identify and optimize drug targets across its focus therapeutic areas of oncology, hematology, neuroscience and immunology. With the help of AI, BMS has set a goal of halving the time from target selection to lead molecule identification, CEO Dr. Chris Pohner said on an April 30 investor call.
When it comes to clinical development, the company is building automation into trial documentation, which could potentially minimize the time between data lock and regulatory filing. A September analysis from McKinsey estimates that Agentic AI could increase clinical development productivity by 35% to 45% in terms of time savings over the next five years.
When it comes to manufacturing, BMS aims to improve quality and compliance with the help of AI, from root cause investigation and documenting preventive measures to bulk release decisions. With commercialization, the company hopes that AI will “turn field insights into structured intelligence, enabling more personalized and timely engagement with healthcare professionals.”
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, said a platform of Claude’s scale will create a “single layer of intelligence” that will revolutionize pharmaceutical capabilities. By connecting to thousands of data sources, Claude said, “we can generate clinical research reports from underlying clinical trial data, uncover the proper scientific context from decades of in-house research, and track the root cause of manufacturing deviations in real time.”
The partnership between BMS and Anthropic comes on the heels of Anthropic hiring Novartis CEO Vasu Narasimhan to its board of directors, demonstrating the AI heavyweight’s life science ambitions.
BMS’ widespread deployment of Anthropic’s Claude highlights the escalating arms race between top Silicon Valley companies and big pharmaceutical companies to build AI capabilities.
One of BMS’ neighbors in New Jersey, Merck & Co., recently embarked on a similarly broad and multifaceted approach to deepening the involvement of AI in its infrastructure. Merck has signed a $1 billion enterprise agreement with Google and its agent AI ecosystem built on Gemini. Merck also aims to deploy Gemini to improve research and development workflows, manufacturing, and productivity in its corporate sector.
Other industry leaders are similarly moving quickly to limit partnerships with AI. Novo Nordisk recently selected OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT developer capabilities from drug discovery to commercial operations. Following the partnership with Novo, OpenAI launched the GPT-Rosalind model focused on biology, drug discovery, and translational medicine.
Meanwhile, Eli Lilly and Roche are busy closing drug discovery deals with AI-based biotechs, while inking AI infrastructure partnerships with Nvidia. Companies such as Sanofi, AstraZeneca, and GSK also continue to build in-house and multivendor AI ecosystems.
In a May 20 statement, Meyers said companies that “learn to do things fundamentally differently with AI” will lead the next decade of biopharmaceuticals, and “BMS intends to be one of them.”
