Representative Image (AP Photo/Patrick Sison)
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have pledged $200 million to back artificial intelligence-related public goods and areas including health and education. AI giant Anthropic announced the same in a press statement. “We’re partnering with the Gates Foundation to commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years. These programs will be implemented with partners in the US and around the world,” said the company.
Anthropic’s full statement on partnership with Bill Gates Gates Foundation
This commitment is central to Anthropic’s efforts to extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not. This work is led by our Beneficial Deployments team, which provides Claude credits and engineering support to our partners in the four priority areas mentioned above. The team also develops AI-related public goods, such as public health datasets and evaluation benchmarks, and offers nonprofits and education institutions discounted access to Claude. We’re increasing our investment in beneficial deployments, and plan to share more about our approach to this work, and the impact of the programs we’ve supported.Below, we outline what’s involved in our partnership with the Gates Foundation, including our new initiatives and the work that’s already underway.Global health and life sciencesThe largest part of our partnership will focus on improving health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where around 4.6 billion people lack access to essential health services. Anthropic will work with the Gates Foundation and others on a range of new and existing programs that will accelerate the development of new vaccines and therapies, and help governments use health data to make faster, better-informed decisions.As part of this work on healthcare intelligence, we’ll create connectors (which grant Claude direct access to other platforms and tools), benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks that allow researchers, developers, and governments to better understand how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks.In addition, we’ll work with the Gates Foundation to engage health ministries and their implementing partners on how to use health-intelligence data to support decision-making around workforce deployment, supply chain management, and outbreak detection. Together, we will explore how AI can better support frontline health workers and patients in navigating diagnosis, treatment, and medical decision-making.We’ll also use Claude to advance research on high-burden and neglected diseases. Scientists already use Claude to detect patterns in systematic reviews and large datasets, and to screen potential drug and vaccine candidates. Our partnership with the Gates Foundation will extend this work to overlooked diseases, starting with polio, HPV, and eclampsia/preeclampsia.Together, we will explore how AI can make it faster and easier for scientists to screen potential vaccine candidates—including vaccines that protect against diseases like polio—computationally before moving into pre-clinical development. This could help shorten the early-stage development timeline. A related effort will use Claude to screen for new therapies for HPV and preeclampsia, which cause cervical cancer and dangerous pregnancy disorders, respectively. HPV causes roughly 350,000 deaths annually, of which 90% are in low- and middle-income countries.Finally, we’re partnering with the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM), a research group within the Gates Foundation, to improve the forecasts that determine where and how treatments for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are deployed. An integration with Claude will make IDM’s forecasts more accessible to practitioners and researchers who aren’t modeling specialists, and will help IDM develop more predictive models of disease transmission.EducationWe’re also co-developing tools to improve educational outcomes for K-12 students in the US, sub-Saharan Africa, and India. This includes creating public goods—like model benchmarks, datasets, and knowledge graphs—to ensure AI tools for math tutoring, college advising, and curriculum design are effective. The first of these will be released publicly later this year.In the US, Claude will also power educational tools that provide evidence-based tutoring to K-12 students, as well as career guidance for students moving into the workforce. In sub-Saharan Africa and India, we are creating AI-powered apps that support foundational literacy and numeracy programs. Along with the Gates Foundation and other partners, we’ve begun this work as part of the broader Global Al for Learning Alliance (GAILA).Economic mobilityFinally, our partnership will support programs designed to improve economic mobility. One of the Gates Foundation’s focus areas is increasing agricultural productivity to improve the livelihoods of the nearly two billion people whose incomes depend on smallholder farming. We will support this work by making agriculture-specific improvements to Claude, datasets of local crops, and benchmarks to evaluate how our models perform in agricultural applications, before releasing these tools as public goods.In the US, our partnership will span three areas: developing portable records of a person’s skills and certifications to carry across schools and jobs; providing trustworthy career guidance for new entrants in the job market and those who are retraining; and creating tools that link data from training programs to employment outcomes in order to measure which economic mobility interventions improve job and wage outcomes.ConclusionThe Gates Foundation has decades of experience and a track record of measurable impact in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility. We’re looking forward to working with them and their partners to set up these programs and apply Claude to real-world problems.As we scale our partnership over the coming years—and as we ratchet up our work on beneficial deployments more generally—we expect to learn much more about how Claude can make a difference. We intend to publish our thinking and decision-making as we do.
