Anthropic announced a new suite of health care and life sciences features for its Claude artificial intelligence platform on Sunday. The features enable users to share access to their health records and fitness app data, including from Apple’s iOS Health app, to personalize health-related conversations.
The launch occurred days after rival OpenAI introduced its ChatGPT Health tool. Both companies now offer tools that integrate personal health data into AI interactions. Users must join a waitlist for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health, while Anthropic’s health care features are immediately available to Pro and Max plan subscribers in the United States.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of life sciences at Anthropic, described the new Claude for Healthcare functions during an interview with NBC News. “When navigating through health systems and health situations, you often have this feeling that you’re sort of alone and that you’re tying together all this data from all these sources, stuff about your health and your medical records, and you’re on the phone all the time,” he said. “I’m really excited about getting to the world where Claude can just take care of all that.”
He added that the tools allow users to “integrate all of your personal information together with your medical records and your insurance records, and have Claude as the orchestrator and be able to navigate the whole thing and simplify it for you.” Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI companies and newly rumored to be valued at $350 billion, positions these features as aids for handling complex health care issues.
OpenAI stated that hundreds of millions of people ask wellness- or health-related questions on ChatGPT every week. The company emphasized that ChatGPT Health is “not intended for diagnosis or treatment,” but instead helps users “navigate everyday questions and understand patterns over time — not just moments of illness.” AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can assist in understanding medical reports, verifying doctors’ decisions, and summarizing information for people lacking access to medical care.
Anthropic highlighted privacy measures in a blog post. Health data shared with Claude is excluded from the model’s memory and not used for training future systems. Users can disconnect or edit permissions at any time.
The company also introduced tools for health care providers and expanded Claude for Life Science offerings to improve scientific discovery. These include a HIPAA-ready infrastructure that connects to federal health care coverage databases and the official registry of medical providers. The features aim to ease workloads by automating tasks such as preparing prior authorization requests for specialist care and supporting insurance appeals through matching clinical guidelines to patient records.
Dhruv Parthasarathy, chief technology officer at Commure, a company that creates AI solutions for medical documentation, said in a statement that Claude’s features will help in “saving clinicians millions of hours annually and returning their focus to patient care.”
The announcements follow months of scrutiny over AI chatbots providing mental health and medical advice. On Thursday, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle a lawsuit alleging their AI tools contributed to worsening mental health among teenagers who died by suicide. Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies warn that their systems can make mistakes and should not replace professional judgment.
Anthropic’s acceptable use policy states that “a qualified professional … must review the content or decision prior to dissemination or finalization” when Claude is used for “healthcare decisions, medical diagnosis, patient care, therapy, mental health, or other medical guidance.”
Kauderer-Abrams noted, “These tools are incredibly powerful, and for many people, they can save you 90% of the time that you spend on something. But for critical use cases where every detail matters, you should absolutely still check the information. We’re not claiming that you can completely remove the human from the loop. We see it as a tool to amplify what the human experts can do.”
