AI heavyweight Anthropic has appointed Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board of directors as the link between the pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley deepens.
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.
“Getting powerful new technology to people safely and at scale is what we think about every day at Anthropic,” Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, said in Tuesday’s statement. “Vas has been doing exactly that for years, and I’m grateful he’s joining us.”
By tapping Narasimhan, the Claude maker and self-dubbed “AI safety and research company” is inching closer toward the world of biotech innovation while navigating the ethical boundaries that are also key to medicine.
As for Novartis, the marriage could be a prelude to further investments in AI, a path that the pharma industry as a whole has eagerly embarked on.
“In healthcare, AI is accelerating solutions to some of the hardest scientific challenges, from deepening our understanding of 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, and I’m honored to join the Board and contribute to its mission.”
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Novartis has formed several partnerships focused on AI for drug discovery. In early 2024, the Swiss pharma entered into a research collaboration with Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs to use the latter’s AI platform, including AlphaFold, to discover small molecules against three undisclosed targets.
The other company that tapped Isomorphic’s AI capabilities at that same time, Eli Lilly, has recently become a poster child of pharma’s commitment to AI, what with a supercomputer and a co-innovation lab with Nvidia.
Besides Isomorphic, Novartis has also made AI-related bets on Schrödinger, Flagship Pioneering-founded Generate:Biomedicines before its recent IPO and London-based Relation Therapeutics, among others.
“I think AI is something that now has become part of the toolkit certainly for target identification [and] candidate optimization,” Narasimhan said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January. “From a drug target standpoint, we’ll have to see how AI pans out.”
“The way we think about it is having deep partnerships,” he continued.
Novartis’ vision is to slash the time between deciding to pursue a target and the first clinical studies for associated drugs in half, from an average of four years to roughly two, while increasing the probability of success significantly, Narasimhan said.
But as Anthropic knows well, adventures in AI can be accompanied by significant turbulence. The company, embroiled in a high-profile legal dispute with the Pentagon over the use of its AI models, has been labeled as a “supply chain risk,” although the designation is being challenged in court. President Donald Trump has ordered a ban of Anthropic across the federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services.
Novartis declined to comment on potential regulatory or political repercussions from Narasimhan’s appointment, only saying that, “Novartis congratulates Vas Narasimhan on his appointment to the Board of Directors at Anthropic.”
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Under Narasimhan’s leadership, Novartis a few years ago adopted a U.S.-first strategy, putting an emphasis on the U.S. market across its business segments and in every step of its decision-making process. Last year, the Swiss firm also joined its peers in forming a “most favored nation” drug pricing deal with the Trump administration and committed to spending $23 billion on U.S. manufacturing and R&D.
Narasimhan’s appointment to Anthropic’s board also comes shortly after its Swiss compatriot, Roche, teamed up with Nvidia on a “hybrid-cloud AI factory” designed to accelerate development for therapeutics and diagnostics.
Narasimhan may be the first pharmaceutical executive to join the governing body of a large AI powerhouse like Anthropic, but he’s not the first from the biopharma world to take a personal interest in guiding an AI firm. His predecessor at Novartis, Joe Jimenez, a co-founder and managing director at the venture capital outfit Aditum Bio, recently joined the advisory board of Aily Labs, an AI software company enabling enterprise decision-making, alongside Derica Rice, who previously served as president of CVS Caremark and CFO of Lilly.