Artificial intelligence company Anthropic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced a four-year partnership worth $200 million to develop AI tools and public digital infrastructure for global health, education and agriculture, with India among the focus regions for deployment.
The partnership includes grant funding, Claude usage credits and technical support aimed at improving access to AI systems in low- and middle-income countries, where the organisations say frontline workers, researchers and policymakers often lack tools designed for local contexts.
A significant part of the collaboration will focus on global health and life sciences, particularly in countries where access to essential healthcare services remains limited. Anthropic said it would work with the Gates Foundation and other partners to accelerate the development of vaccines and therapies, while helping governments use health data more effectively for decision-making.
The initiative will include the creation of AI connectors, benchmarks and evaluation frameworks that would allow researchers, developers and governments to assess how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks. The organisations said they would also engage health ministries and implementation partners on the use of health-intelligence data for workforce deployment, supply chain management and outbreak detection.
The partnership will initially focus on diseases including polio, HPV and preeclampsia. Anthropic said scientists are already using Claude to identify patterns in systematic reviews and large datasets, and to screen potential drug and vaccine candidates. The expanded collaboration aims to extend those applications to neglected and high-burden diseases.
The companies said AI tools could help scientists computationally screen vaccine candidates before pre-clinical development, potentially shortening early-stage research timelines. Another effort will explore the use of Claude to screen therapies for HPV and preeclampsia, conditions linked to cervical cancer and pregnancy-related complications respectively. According to the announcement, HPV causes roughly 350,000 deaths annually, with 90% occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Anthropic is also partnering with the Institute for Disease Modeling to improve disease forecasting models used for malaria and tuberculosis treatment deployment. The integration with Claude is expected to make modelling tools more accessible to practitioners and researchers who are not specialists in epidemiological modelling.
India features prominently in the education component of the partnership. The organisations said they are co-developing AI tools and public digital resources for K-12 education in India, sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. The work includes benchmarks, datasets and knowledge graphs intended to improve AI systems used for maths tutoring, curriculum design and college advising.
In India and sub-Saharan Africa, the collaboration will support AI-powered applications focused on foundational literacy and numeracy. This work is being carried out under the broader Global AI for Learning Alliance (GAILA), according to the announcement.
The partnership also extends to agriculture and economic mobility. Anthropic said it plans to make agriculture-specific improvements to Claude using datasets of local crops and benchmarks designed to evaluate AI performance in farming applications. The organisations said the tools would support farmers with guidance on planting, soil health, crop disease, livestock care and market conditions using locally relevant data and local languages.
The Gates Foundation said the collaboration is intended to ensure AI systems are designed with equity in mind and built alongside the communities expected to use them, including health workers, teachers, policymakers and farmers in underserved settings.
The organisations said they plan to publish more details about their approach and the impact of the programmes as the partnership expands over the coming years.
