Anthropic rolls out Claude for Healthcare as AI tools make deeper inroads into medicine

Anthropic has unveiled a new healthcare-focused version of its AI assistant, Claude, marking its latest push into the rapidly growing market for artificial intelligence in medicine. The new service, called Claude for Healthcare, allows healthcare providers, companies and individual users in the United States to use the chatbot for medical and life sciences-related tasks, just days after rival OpenAI introduced its own ChatGPT Health feature.

The company said the new offering adds a range of connectors that let Claude tap into widely used medical and scientific databases. These include the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Coverage Database, the ICD-10 disease classification system and the National Provider Identifier Registry, among others. By linking to these sources, Claude can surface and interpret healthcare information that is often scattered across complex systems.

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For businesses, Anthropic says the platform is designed to support healthcare startups developing new products as well as large enterprises seeking to integrate AI into operations such as clinical trial management, regulatory compliance and other life sciences workflows. The expanded capabilities are meant to reduce the time spent navigating technical data and documentation.

For individual users, the focus is on helping people better understand their own health. With permission, Claude can access lab results and health records, summarise medical histories, explain test outcomes in plain language, spot trends across fitness and health data, and generate questions that patients can take to doctor appointments. Anthropic says the goal is to make medical conversations more productive and help users stay informed about their wellbeing.

The company has emphasised privacy and control as central to the design. Users must opt in before Claude can access any health information, can choose exactly what data to share, and are free to revoke or modify permissions at any time. Anthropic also said that personal health data will not be used to train its AI models.

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The service is currently available only in the US and only to subscribers on Claude’s Pro and Max plans. Initial connectors, including those from New HealthEx and Function, are rolling out in beta, while Apple Health and Android Health integrations are expected to become available on the Claude mobile apps this week.

Anthropic added that Claude will include built-in safeguards such as contextual disclaimers, transparent acknowledgment of uncertainty and clear prompts to seek professional medical advice. As AI tools increasingly move into sensitive areas like healthcare, the company says these measures are meant to ensure the technology supports, rather than replaces, clinicians and informed decision-making.