Anthropic is changing how it hands out free Claude access to scientists. Its AI for Science programme, launched in May 2025, began by backing individual researchers. It now works through 20 named partners, a mix of funders, research institutes and specific projects, so credits can reach people in fields Anthropic would struggle to find on its own. For a working scientist, the practical upshot is that the route to free Claude use may now run through a grant body or an employer rather than an application to Anthropic.
The partners fall into four groups. Six funders and societies, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, Renaissance Philanthropy's Open Source for Science Fund, the US National Science Foundation and CAS, part of the American Chemical Society, will pass credits on to researchers they support. Six institutions, among them the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute, Imperial College London's life sciences department, EMBL and the Gladstone Institutes, will use credits in-house. Six projects receive credits directly, from Princeton's FlyWire brain-wiring map and gnomAD at the Broad Institute to Tau Ceti, which is building a library of maths checked in the Lean proof language. Two earlier collaborators, HHMI Janelia and the Allen Institute, complete the list.
Funders are the significant addition. The NSF alone, a $9 billion agency, provides about 25% of federal money for basic research at US universities, so even a small allocation through it could touch many labs. Anthropic says many of the projects will release open datasets, software and standards, which would make the benefit outlast the credits. It has also offered scientists a discounted Team plan, and the programme sits alongside the Claude assistant we review.
Rivals are making similar moves. OpenAI's Rosalind Academic Plan gives eligible labs up to 30 seats of its life sciences model free for up to 12 months, and Google DeepMind has offered 10,000 scientists its top Antigravity tier free for six months alongside new chemistry skills. Free access for researchers has become a standard way for labs to win early users in science, and the terms differ more than the headlines suggest.
What the announcement leaves out matters. There is no value for the credits, no count of researchers expected to benefit and no explanation of how to apply beyond going through the funders. Nothing is said about data handling, which matters for anyone working with unpublished results, patient data or material under embargo. Many of the partnerships are described as early, and Anthropic promises to report results later. Until it does, this is a statement of intent with a respectable list of names rather than a measurable commitment.