Anthropic opens guest investigator slots for life sciences labs

Anthropic is inviting principal investigators in biology, chemistry, and clinical science to apply for an 8-12 week collaboration, working directly with Anthropic researchers using Claude at no cost. This lesson covers what the program offers and how to write a tight collaboration proposal with Claude's help.

Anthropic just opened a guest investigator program for life sciences researchers. Published October 22, 2026, the call invites principal investigators and their research groups at academic institutions, nonprofits, or government labs to apply for a direct collaboration with Anthropic.

Here's how it works. Selected guest investigators work with Anthropic researchers for 8 to 12 weeks (some projects may extend beyond that) on a problem in causal human biology, structural and computational molecular biology, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, or clinical science. Anthropic runs its models and harnesses for the project at no cost to the investigator.

Three details matter if you're deciding whether to apply. First, the team plans to publish outputs and open-source the accompanying data and code. Second, guest investigators keep the rights to their data at every step, plus rights to any independent follow-on research. Third, applicants should only submit publicly available information — Anthropic is not asking for your underlying data, in the application or during the collaboration.

Timing: applications stay open for about 14 days, and Anthropic aims to notify selected participants by email roughly 14 days after applications close. This sits alongside two other programs: the Life Sciences Verification Program (direct access to Anthropic's most capable public models for biology) and the AI for Science initiative (Claude credits for researchers).

The hardest part of applying isn't the science — it's proving, in a page or two, that your lab can produce something concrete in 8 to 12 weeks. Anthropic says explicitly it expects most open biology problems to take longer than that to fully validate. So the proposal needs to separate the long-term question from the short-term deliverable: a preliminary discovery, an answer to a narrower open question, an open-source dataset, or a public resource.

If you run or advise a life sciences lab, you now know what Anthropic is asking for: a scoped, 8-12 week deliverable built on public data, with a clear case for why direct collaboration with Anthropic researchers — not just API access — is what makes that timeline possible. Use Claude to draft and pressure-test that scoping before you submit.