5 takeaways from Anthropic’s big science event

Even compared to most CEOs of AI companies, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei is known for making jaw-dropping predictions. In his October 2024 essay “Machines of Loving Grace,” he made one of his most famous: “AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.” He called the effect the “compressed 21st century.” On June 30, at an Anthropic event in San Francisco called “The Briefing: AI for Science,” Amodei didn’t declare that AI’s impact on biology and other sciences had unleashed that effect, or was about to pull it off. Instead, he emphasized that he doesn’t expect it to transpire in the next couple of years. He floated that it “might” happen a decade from now. In AI, 2036 feels like the incredibly distant future. But the point of Anthropic’s event was to make the case that the company is working toward the compression that Amodei wrote about. In particular, it unveiled Claude Science, a new version of Claude, tuned for scientific research, that’s launching in beta today. Alexander Tarashansky, who led development of the product, did an extended on-stage demo. From left: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, GLP-1 pioneer Lotte Knudsen, and interviewer Matthew Herper at Anthropic’s science event at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center on June 30, 2026. [Photo: Harry McCracken] Most of the remainder of the event was dedicated to panel discussions, with participants including Amodei, GLP-1 drug inventor Lotte Knudsen, Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, and Genentech executive VP Aviv Regev. Though optimism about AI’s impact on the sciences certainly prevailed, it wasn’t unbridled. The conversations were surprisingly substantive, acknowledging that even rapidly improving AI can do only so much to advance fields such as drug discovery. As I sat in the audience at the Yerba Buena Center, here’s some of what I found most worthwhi