Novo Nordisk and Anthropic announced a collaboration on September 16, 2026 aimed at helping Novo accelerate the development of new medicines and advance AI-driven software development. The companies will jointly address key drug discovery challenges identified by scientists and computational teams at Novo, developing targeted solutions for specific scientific challenges and workflows to support biological reasoning.
Mike Doustdar, President and CEO of Novo, said: “This partnership is another testament to our ambition to become the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company, building on Novo’s current AI initiatives with other technology partners. Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organisation and help us on our mission to bring new, transformative health solutions to people living with chronic diseases. AI can help us increase productivity in R&D and compress the path from research to marketed products. But beyond this, AI tools can also offer completely new scientific opportunities and aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics.”
Testing Claude Science on Novo’s Toughest R&D Problems
As an initial aim, Novo will test Claude Science — Anthropic’s AI workbench for scientists — on specific R&D workflows, focusing on scientific problems where the two companies’ joint capabilities are expected to have the greatest impact. Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said: “AI’s increasing capability brings with it the potential to compress a century’s worth of biological and medical breakthroughs into a decade. By giving leading researchers access to safe, capable, and trusted frontier models, we can shorten research timelines, improve outcomes, and discover medicines and treatments that significantly improve human life. That is exactly what our collaboration with Novo is built to achieve.” Novo will also use Anthropic’s frontier models to strengthen AI-driven software development more broadly across the company, which it describes as a key enabler for scaling AI internally.
Built With Data Governance in Mind
Novo says the collaboration has been designed with robust data governance and human oversight, intended to help ensure AI is applied responsibly and in line with the company’s ethical and compliance standards. That framing matters in an industry where AI tools touch sensitive patient data, proprietary research, and decisions that ultimately feed into regulatory submissions — pharmaceutical companies operate under strict data privacy, GxP, and intellectual property requirements that don’t bend to accommodate new technology. Building in oversight and governance from the outset, rather than retrofitting it later, is generally seen as essential for AI tools to gain traction in regulated R&D workflows.
About Novo Nordisk
Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with more than a century of history combining scientific expertise with an understanding of people’s lives, developing treatments and support for millions of people. The company employs more than 67,000 people worldwide and works through partnerships, programmes, and investments to prevent disease, expand access to treatments, and reduce its environmental impact.
