Bristol Myers Squibb and Anthropic have entered a strategic agreement to deploy Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence platform across Bristol Myers Squibb’s global operations, marking a major expansion of the pharmaceutical company’s use of AI in research, drug development, manufacturing and commercial functions.
The collaboration reflects a shift in how the biopharmaceutical sector is approaching artificial intelligence, moving beyond employee chatbot tools toward so-called “agentic” AI systems capable of assisting with operational workflows and decision-making processes embedded across an organization.
Under the agreement, Bristol Myers Squibb plans to roll out Claude capabilities to more than 30,000 employees worldwide. The company said the deployment is designed to improve productivity, unlock institutional knowledge and accelerate scientific and operational activities throughout the medicine development lifecycle.
A central focus of the partnership will be software engineering and data science. Bristol Myers Squibb said its engineering teams will use Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding and reasoning technology, to streamline software and AI development, helping standardize internal systems and improve access to scientific and operational data often fragmented across legacy platforms.
The company also plans to evaluate Claude as an intelligent “agentic layer” integrated into priority workflows that support research, clinical development, manufacturing and commercialization of medicines.
In research, Claude will be used to analyze decades of proprietary scientific, molecular and clinical datasets to support drug target identification and optimization efforts, particularly in oncology, hematology, neuroscience and immunology. By applying advanced reasoning to internal datasets, researchers may be able to extract predictive insights faster and improve scientific decision-making.
In drug development, the company expects AI-driven automation to support clinical trial documentation, including clinical study reports, patient safety narratives and regulatory filing materials. Bristol Myers Squibb said such capabilities could help shorten timelines between trial completion and regulatory submissions.
The company also sees opportunities in manufacturing and quality operations. Claude may assist with identifying manufacturing deviations, root-cause investigations, corrective and preventive action documentation, and batch release decisions aimed at strengthening compliance while improving efficiency in medicine production.
Commercial and medical affairs teams are also expected to benefit through AI systems capable of converting field intelligence into structured insights, potentially enabling more personalized and timely engagement with healthcare professionals.
Greg Meyers, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer at Bristol Myers Squibb, said artificial intelligence represents one of the most significant opportunities for advancing the company’s scientific mission. He noted that while many organizations remain focused on chatbot-style systems, the larger opportunity lies in unlocking valuable knowledge trapped across decades of disconnected data systems.
The partnership builds on more than three years of AI investment at Bristol Myers Squibb, during which employees have been given access to frontier AI models through an internal platform as part of a broader multi-vendor strategy.
According to Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Claude’s deployment across thousands of enterprise data sources could allow Bristol Myers Squibb employees to generate clinical reports from trial data, retrieve scientific insights from historical research and investigate manufacturing issues in real time. He said the combination of AI automation and scientific expertise could ultimately help medicines reach patients more quickly.