Scientists at the Allen Institute and the world’s leading AI researchers and engineers from Anthropic are joining forces to fuel transformative discoveries in human health. Together, they’re embarking on an ambitious mission to design and deploy custom, autonomous AI agents that will tackle the most challenging questions in bioscience at an unprecedented speed and scale.

“This partnership is about extending what scientists can do. As biological data grows in scale and complexity, the challenge isn’t coming up with good ideas, it’s having the capacity to explore them,” said Andy Hickl, chief technology officer at the Allen Institute “Working with Anthropic lets us apply scientific thinking across far more data and far more hypotheses, and to do it faster than was previously possible. That gives researchers more room to experiment, follow their instincts, and turn insight into impact.”

The partnership will design custom AI agents that can independently perform the following:

• Metadata collection and capture. Collecting, describing, and categorizing massive amounts of data on the brain—a painstaking task that would take human scientists months to complete.
• Multi-modal data analysis. Analyzing petabytes of diverse data types to discover patterns, trends, connections, insights, and unlock new hypotheses that will lead to a deeper understanding of the brain and new ways to target diseases affecting it.
• DNA design. Designing custom DNA to solve biological challenges and perform critical functions in the body to help lead to better therapies and treatment.
• Annotation. Allen Institute generates some of the largest and most complex datasets in science, and the time spent organizing and classifying this data is immense. The collaboration with Anthropic will design AI agents able to classify brain cell types by function, shape, and other cellular properties to provide deeper understanding and improve usability to fuel scientific progress.

This critical partnership brings together industry giants in their respective fields, leveraging years of insight, experience, and technical expertise for a shared goal: the advancement of human health. It’s an exciting chapter in science and technology that will help researchers worldwide ask bold questions; make new, powerful discoveries in biology; and understand the foundations of life.