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Anthropic expands AI for Science, its free Claude credits program, to 20 foundations and research institutions
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
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Anthropic is bringing 20 foundations, institutes and research groups into AI for Science, its initiative that gives away Claude credits for scientific projects that could make a big difference. The US National Science Foundation, Sloan, Simons and Schmidt Sciences will be the ones passing those credits on to researchers. The Francis Crick Institute and EMBL, by contrast, will use them behind their own doors.
Anthropic wants to reach more researchers with Claude, its AI model, through foundations and research institutions.
On 28 October, the company announced the expansion of AI for Science, a program that hands out free Claude credits to people leading scientific projects with a big potential impact, with 20 partner foundations, institutes and research teams spread across the globe. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Schmidt Sciences and the US National Science Foundation will pass those credits on to researchers. Other partners, such as the Francis Crick Institute, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the institute that runs science operations for the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, will use them within their own organizations.
The program began in May 2025 to support individual scientists. According to Anthropic, many of these projects will yield public goods: data that anyone can use, software with open code, open standards and libraries that researchers share.
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Anthropic changes how the program is handed out: instead of serving researchers one by one, it gives credits to organizations that already fund or carry out science on a large scale. That way Claude reaches laboratories, observatories and genomics centers through intermediary organizations, and the company widens its reach without handling each application separately. For a scientist, the practical change is that the way in becomes their own foundation or institute. It remains unclear how many credits are being distributed, for how long and under what criteria, because the Anthropic note does not say. Anyone who works with one of these bodies can ask whether it already has those credits.
Official source: Anthropic · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
