Anthropic Is Taking Medical AI Global With a New Partnership. It Aims To Take The Work To Some 100 Countries.

Anthropic and medical knowledge platform OpenEvidence are expanding an AI-powered clinical decision-support service to physicians in about 100 countries, including several where doctors have limited access to specialist expertise, medical literature and other healthcare resources.

The initiative will provide a specialized version of OpenEvidence free to healthcare professionals in dozens of low- and middle-income countries, including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. OpenEvidence already offers its platform free to clinicians in the United States and Europe. The service answers clinical questions using peer-reviewed medical research and treatment guidelines.

Anthropic will provide the underlying technology, while OpenEvidence will adapt the service to different regions and healthcare systems. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

OpenEvidence has already been working to tailor its technology for countries where disease patterns, diagnostic resources and available treatments can differ significantly from those in the United States and other wealthier markets.

In January, OpenEvidence partnered with the Rwanda Biomedical Center and nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives to evaluate its clinical decision-support technology in lower-resource settings. The project involved 45 Rwandan doctors and nurses who tested the system and provided feedback on how it could better reflect local clinical conditions, Resolve to Save Lives said at the time.

The company has also been working with healthcare organizations in Botswana, where differences in available treatments, diagnostic equipment and other resources can affect how medical information is used in practice.

The broader rollout includes countries where healthcare systems have been severely disrupted by war and humanitarian crises. Sudan, one of the countries covered by the initiative, has faced widespread damage to its healthcare system during more than three years of fighting.

As of April, 37% of health facilities across Sudan's 18 states were non-functional, while disease outbreaks and malnutrition were putting further pressure on the remaining system. The World Health Organization said 21 million people lacked access to health services and it had verified 217 attacks on healthcare since the conflict began in April 2023.

Healthcare services have also been disrupted by fighting elsewhere. The World Health Organization said the escalation of conflict across the Middle East since February has killed and injured civilians and health workers, damaged medical facilities and interrupted treatment for injuries and chronic illnesses. Disruptions to air and maritime routes have also affected the movement of medical equipment and humanitarian supplies.

Access to medical information does not always depend on hospital infrastructure. OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler said that even in places where medical facilities lack reliable electricity, most physicians have smartphones, giving them another way to access clinical information.

OpenEvidence is already widely used by doctors in the United States. American clinicians consulted the platform 42 million times in August alone, Nadler told Reuters. He said several hundred million Americans will have been treated during 2026 by a doctor who used OpenEvidence to help guide care.

The partnership comes as Anthropic expands its work in medicine and biological research beyond its general-purpose AI models. The company has established a laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct physical biology experiments as part of its push into life sciences and drug research. Anthropic has also developed Claude Science software and acquired Coefficient Bio.

The growing use of AI in medicine has also brought scrutiny over how such systems perform outside the environments in which they were developed. One issue is whether tools trained largely on information from wealthier countries adequately reflect differences in diseases, treatments and medical resources elsewhere.