Anthropic Expands Its AI for Science Programme to 20 Foundations and Institutes, Including Three in the UK

Anthropic announced on 28 October 2026 that it is expanding its AI for Science programme beyond individual researchers. The programme, which began in May 2025, provides free Claude credits to scientists working on high-impact projects. The new announcement highlights 20 scientific foundations, institutions and research groups that Anthropic has partnered with.

Three of the named institutions are in the UK. The Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London's Department of Life Sciences will use credits inside their own organisations to support research. Other institutions include the Space Telescope Science Institute, EMBL and the Gladstone Institutes.

A second group are funders that will pass credits on to researchers. They include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, the US National Science Foundation and CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society. Anthropic does not say how many credits each partner receives.

The project examples are specific. FlyWire at Princeton is developing open connectomics data to study how neural circuits produce behaviour. LEAP at Columbia combines machine learning with physics to improve climate models. AstroPath at Johns Hopkins images tumours cell by cell using calibration methods from astronomy. The gnomAD resource at the Broad Institute maintains an open reference of human genetic variation drawn from more than 800,000 people.

Others are building shared tools, including a machine-checkable mathematics library in Lean and a Model Hardware Standard, in research preview, so AI agents can operate laboratory instruments. Anthropic says the work is expected to produce public goods such as open datasets, open-source software and open standards.

This is not directly about design or 3D, but it matters to our corner of the world for two reasons. First, it shows where large AI developers are spending effort, and it is on research as much as on chatbots. Second, scientific imaging, simulation and data visualisation are close cousins of the real-time and 3D work we do. Better tooling for researchers tends to find its way into creative software a few years later.

The announcement is from Anthropic itself, so the claims about expected outcomes are intentions, not results.