Bristol Myers Squibb is the latest large pharma company to be making a major bet on artificial intelligence, announcing a sweeping agreement with Anthropic to deploy its AI tool Claude as the “shared intelligence platform” across the drugmaker’s global operations.
The deal will put Claude’s advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities in the hands of more than 30,000 BMS employees.
While many early pharma adoptions of AI focused on simple chatbots, BMS says this Anthropic collaboration signals a “meaningful evolution.” The New Jersey pharma is now building agentic AI capabilities into the day-to-day workflows that drive its drug R&D, manufacturing and commercial operations.
“Most enterprise AI stops at the chatbot,” Greg Myers, BMS’ chief digital and technology officer, said in a May 20 statement. “The real prize is the untapped value still trapped behind decades of data silos, and this collaboration is how we reach it. Anthropic’s Claude gives us the agentic capabilities, pace of innovation, and security necessary to connect our systems and put that collective knowledge in the hands of every BMS employee to accelerate innovation for patients.”
The rollout marks a continuation of more than three years of AI investment at BMS. The company launched its first version of an AI chatbot in January 2023, shortly after OpenAI’s ChatGPT emerged.
Moving forward, BMS will deploy Anthropic’s developer tool, Claude Code, to speed up internal software and AI development to “unlock data and expertise long trapped in the disconnected systems that define biopharma today,” the drugmaker said.
Regarding core workflows that move drugs forward, BMS said it will evaluate the potential to apply Claude’s AI reasoning to its proprietary research data to aid drug target identification and optimization across its focus therapeutic areas of oncology, hematology, neuroscience and immunology. With AI’s assistance, BMS has set a target to halve the time from target selection to lead molecule identification, CEO Chris Poerner, Ph.D., said on an investor call April 30.
As for clinical development, the company is building automation into trial documentation while potentially minimizing the time between data locks and regulatory filings. A McKinsey analysis in September estimated that Agentic AI can boost clinical development productivity in terms of time savings by 35% to 45% over the next five years.
For manufacturing, BMS is eyeing better quality and compliance with the help of AI ranging from root-cause investigations and preventive action documentation to batch release decisions. With commercialization, the company hopes AI could turn “field insights into structured intelligence that enables more personalized and timely engagement with healthcare professionals.”
According to Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of life sciences at Anthropic, a platform of Claude’s scale creates “a single intelligence layer” that will revamp how pharma functions. Connected to thousands of data sources, Claude can “generate a clinical study report from underlying trial data, surface the right scientific context from decades of internal research, or trace the root cause of a manufacturing deviation in real time,” he said.
The BMS-Anthropic collaboration comes shortly after Anthropic recruited Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board, signaling the AI heavyweight’s ambition in life sciences.
BMS’ broad rollout of Anthropic’s Claude highlights an intensifying arms race among major pharmaceutical companies to establish AI capabilities with Silicon Valley’s top firms.
One of BMS’ neighbors in New Jersey, Merck & Co., recently undertook a similarly expansive, multi-pronged approach to deepening AI’s involvement in its infrastructure. Merck went with Google and its agentic AI ecosystem built on Gemini in a potential $1 billion enterprise deal. Merck also aims to deploy Gemini to improve R&D workflows, manufacturing and productivity in corporate functions.
Other industry leaders are moving quickly to lock down AI alliances as well. Novo Nordisk recently picked OpenAI to integrate the ChatGPT developer’s capabilities from drug discovery to commercial operations. On the heels of the Novo tie-up, OpenAI launched its GPT-Rosalind model focused on biology, drug discovery and translational medicine.
Meanwhile, Eli Lilly and Roche have formed AI infrastructure collaborations with Nvidia, while they are busy inking drug discovery deals with AI-based biotechs. Companies like Sanofi, AstraZeneca and GSK also continue to build out their internal and multi-vendor AI ecosystems.
Companies that “learn to operate fundamentally differently with AI” will lead the next decade of biopharma, Myers said in his May 20 statement, “and BMS intends to be one of them.”