Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) has signed a strategic agreement with Anthropic to implement its Claude platform across its global operations.

The initiative will embed agentic capabilities throughout BMS’ research, clinical, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate operations.

It aims to shift from basic conversational AI towards advanced agentic tools within daily workflows, furthering the company’s evolution in digital transformation by deploying the Claude AI platform at scale.

BMS will roll out Claude to more than 30,000 employees, targeting three main areas for near-term impact.

The company's engineering and data science teams will use Claude Code to enhance software and AI development, supporting standardised processes and unlocking siloed data across the company’s systems.

This development seeks to streamline expertise traditionally trapped within disconnected platforms in the pharmaceutical sector.

Secondly, BMS plans to integrate agentic AI within workflows that drive drug advancement.

Researchers will apply advanced reasoning tools to decades of data spanning oncology, haematology, immunology, and neuroscience for quicker target identification.

In drug development, the platform will automate documentation, ranging from clinical study reports to patient safety narratives and regulatory submissions, potentially reducing the interval between data lock and application filing.

For manufacturing and quality, Claude is set to accelerate product development by supporting functions such as root cause investigations, corrective action documentation, and data-driven batch release decisions.

This is anticipated to strengthen compliance and expedite delivery to patients. In commercial and medical affairs, the platform will help convert field insights into structured intelligence for more effective engagement with healthcare professionals.

A further priority involves securely integrating Claude with the company’s data repositories, ensuring AI-driven decision support across scientific, clinical, regulatory, and commercial expertise, while maintaining full governance and audit controls.

Anthropic head of life sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams said: “By giving employees access to Claude’s agentic capabilities — connected to thousands of data sources across the company — BMS is creating a single intelligence layer that can generate a clinical study report from underlying trial data, surface the right scientific context from decades of internal research, or trace the root cause of a manufacturing deviation in real time.”

Earlier this month, BMS and Chinese biopharma company Hengrui Pharma signed one of the industry’s largest licensing and collaboration agreements, focusing on multiple early-stage assets in oncology, immunology, and haematology.