Image: Anthropic

Anthropic is handing out Claude credits to some of the biggest names in science. The company announced that its AI for Science program now includes 20 foundations, research institutions and research groups from around the world, ranging from the team behind the Hubble and James Webb telescopes to a project that mapped every wire in a fruit fly's brain.

AI for Science launched in May 2025 and gives free Claude credits to researchers working on what Anthropic calls high-impact scientific projects. Until now it mostly supported individual scientists. According to Anthropic, the program has backed hundreds of projects across biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, climate science and mathematics, and the company has also launched a discounted Team plan for scientists. Partnering with institutions, the company says, lets it reach more researchers across more fields.

We’ve expanded our AI for Science program beyond individual teams to support some of the world’s leading scientific foundations, institutions, and research groups.

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) October 29, 2026

The new partners fall into three groups. The first is science funders and societies, which will pass Claude credits on to researchers they choose. That list includes the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, the Open Source for Science Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, the US National Science Foundation and CAS, the American Chemical Society division that has indexed published chemistry for more than a century.

The second group is institutions that will use the credits in house. The Space Telescope Science Institute runs science operations for NASA's Hubble, James Webb and Roman telescopes and holds one of the largest astronomy data archives in the world. It is joined by the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute, the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco.

The third group is where things get especially interesting. Princeton's FlyWire produced the first complete wiring map of an adult fruit fly's brain, according to Anthropic. Johns Hopkins' AstroPath was built by a pathologist and an astrophysicist and uses calibration methods from astronomical surveys to image tumors cell by cell. Columbia's LEAP center blends machine learning with physics to improve how climate models handle clouds, oceans and land. The Broad Institute's gnomAD pools DNA data from more than 800,000 people into an open reference used for rare disease diagnosis.

Mathematicians get a seat too. Tau Ceti is a community project building a shared library of mathematics in Lean, a language that lets computers check every step of a proof. Australia's Centre for Population Genomics, a joint effort of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and Murdoch Children's Research Institute, rounds out the list with work on rare disease diagnosis for the country's multicultural communities.

Anthropic also pointed to earlier partnerships. It worked with HHMI Janelia Research Campus on the Model Hardware Standard, a shared specification meant to let AI agents safely operate lab instruments, which is in research preview. It also supports the Allen Institute, which the company says is building teams of AI agents that turn months of manual data analysis into hours.

Scientists use Claude to generate hypotheses, design experiments, analyze complex data and communicate findings, according to the company. Anthropic says many of the funded projects will produce public goods such as open datasets, open source software and shared libraries. It has not said how many credits each partner will receive or what the expansion is worth.

The company admits that many of the collaborations are in early stages and says it hopes to add more partners. Whether the program leads to new discoveries will depend on what those scientists actually do with it.