Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5.5 With Enhanced Lifescience & Biology Capabilities

It is intended to support a broader range of life sciences applications, including drug discovery, research biology, clinical development, and manufacturing.

Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5.5, its latest AI model addition to the Claude 5.5 family, with expanded capabilities for biology and scientific research.

It also includes new safeguards and a verification programme for life sciences organisations.

The model is designed for complex, multi-step tasks, including software development, agentic workflows, and knowledge-intensive work.

According to the company, Claude Opus 5.5 offers enhanced capabilities in biology, including molecular prediction and design.

In an evaluation conducted with Dyno Therapeutics, the model demonstrated improvements on a long-horizon molecular prediction and design task, while expert red-teamers rated its scientific novelty as comparable to the strongest model they had previously evaluated, according to Anthropic.

The new model incorporates the same biology safeguards as Fable 5.1.

Pharmaceutical companies, academic laboratories and startups can apply through Anthropic’s recently launched Life Sciences Verification Program to access Opus 5.5 aimed at supporting research and development activities.

The programme provides vetted organisations, including academic laboratories, startups and pharmaceutical companies, with access to models under a set of safeguards designed for a broader range of biology-related work.

The verification programme requires organisations to undergo reviews covering research credentials, security standards and ethical oversight.

The model is intended to support a broader range of life sciences applications, including drug discovery, research biology, clinical development and manufacturing.

The platform is currently available across Anthropic's platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Developers can access the model through the Claude Platform using the model identifier claude-opus-5-5.

Earlier this week, Anthropic partnered with OpenEvidence to bring AI clinical decision support to physicians in approximately 100 resource-limited countries, including Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Mongolia, and Haiti.

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