AI giant Anthropic has appointed Novartis CEO Vasu Narasimhan to its board of directors, as ties between the pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley deepen.
Narasimhan shares Anthropic’s vision that healthcare and life sciences are among the areas where AI has the greatest potential to improve the quality of human life, Anthropic said in an April 14 announcement.
“Bringing powerful new technologies to people safely and at scale is something we think about every day at Anthropic,” Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei said in a statement Tuesday. “Vasu has been doing just that for years, and we are grateful that he has joined us.”
By leveraging Narasimhan, Claude’s maker, which bills itself as an “AI safety and research company,” is inching closer to the world of biotech innovation while navigating the ethical boundaries that are also key to medicine.
For Novartis, the marriage could be a prelude to further investments in AI that the entire pharmaceutical industry is eagerly embarking on.
“In medicine, AI is accelerating solutions to some of the most difficult scientific challenges, from better understanding disease biology to designing better medicines,” Narasimhan said in a statement. “Anthropic is setting the standard for how AI should be developed to benefit humanity. I’m honored to join the Board and contribute to that mission.”
Related: Novartis signs $1.7 billion immunodermatology agreement with AI-powered UK biotech
Novartis has entered into several partnerships focused on AI for drug discovery. In early 2024, the Swiss pharmaceutical company entered into a research partnership with Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs to discover small molecules against three undisclosed targets using the company’s AI platforms, including AlphaFold.
Another company that leveraged Isomorphic’s AI capabilities around the same time, Eli Lilly, has recently become the poster child for pharmaceutical company AI efforts, including supercomputers and a joint innovation lab with Nvidia.
Besides Isomorphic, Novartis has other AI bets on Schrödinger, its recent pre-IPO flagship pioneering company Generate:Biomedicines, and London-based Relation Therapeutics.
“I think AI is now definitely part of the toolkit for target identification (and) candidate optimization,” Narasimhan said at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January. “From a drug targeting perspective, we need to see how AI fares.”
“Our idea is to build deep partnerships,” he continued.
Novartis’ vision is to halve the time between deciding to pursue a target and first clinical study of a related drug from an average of four years to about two years, while significantly increasing the probability of success, Narasimhan said.
But as Anthropic knows all too well, adventures in AI can involve significant disruption. The company is embroiled in a high-profile legal dispute with the Department of Defense over its use of AI models and has been labeled a “supply chain risk,” a designation that is being challenged in court. President Donald Trump has ordered an interdiction across the federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services.
Novartis declined to comment on the potential regulatory or political implications of Narasimhan’s appointment, saying only that “Novartis congratulates Vasu Narasimhan on his appointment to Anthropic’s board.”
Related: HHS bans Claude AI tools as President Trump calls for complete government blacklisting of Anthropic
Under Mr. Narasimhan’s leadership, Novartis adopted an America-first strategy several years ago, focusing on the U.S. market across business segments and at every stage of the decision-making process. Last year, the Swiss company joined its peers in striking a “most-favored-nation” drug pricing agreement with the Trump administration, pledging to spend $23 billion on U.S. manufacturing and research and development.
Narasimhan’s appointment to Anthropic’s board also comes on the heels of Swiss compatriot Roche partnering with Nvidia on a “hybrid cloud AI factory” designed to accelerate the development of therapeutics and diagnostics.
Narasimhan may be the first pharmaceutical executive to join the governing body of a large AI giant like Anthropic, but he is not the first in the biopharma industry to take a personal interest in guiding AI companies. His predecessor at Novartis, Joe Jimenez, co-founder and managing director of venture capital organization Adytum Bio, recently joined the advisory board of Aily Labs, an AI software company that enables enterprise decision-making, along with Delica Rice, who previously served as president of CVS Caremark and CFO of Lilly.
