Bristol Myers to deploy Anthropic’s Claude to 30,000+ employees; Anthropic also hires Andrej Karpathy

Bristol Myers Squibb said on May 20 it will make Anthropic’s Claude available to more than 30,000 employees, extending the model across research, clinical development, manufacturing, commercial and corporate functions. Reuters reported the rollout is aimed at speeding the discovery, development and delivery of new medicines. (money.usnews.com) Andrej Karpathy said on May 19 that he had joined Anthropic, adding a prominent OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI executive to the Claude maker’s research ranks. (cnbc.com) Anthropic said Karpathy started this week and will work on pretraining, the large-scale model-building phase that gives Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. ### Why is Bristol Myers putting Claude in front of 30,000 employees? (news.bms.com) Bristol Myers said the Anthropic agreement is meant to push Claude beyond chatbot use and into day-to-day workflows across the company. The drugmaker said employees will use advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities at enterprise scale, with an initial focus on engineering, data science and operational processes. (money.usnews.com) Reuters reported Bristol Myers will also use Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool, and evaluate the system in research, drug development, manufacturing, commercial and medical affairs. Greg Meyers, Bristol Myers’ chief digital and technology officer, said, “Most enterprise AI stops at the chatbot. The real prize is the untapped value still trapped behind decades of data silos, and this collaboration is how we reach it.” (cnbc.com) ### Where inside the drugmaker is the software expected to land first? Bristol Myers said research teams will apply Claude to proprietary scientific, molecular and clinical data to help with target identification and optimization in oncology, hematology, neuroscience and immunology. The company said that use case is intended to help researchers synthesize and interrogate internal data more quickly. (news.bms.com) The company said drug-development teams will test Claude in clinical study reports, patient safety narratives and regulatory submissions. Manufacturing and quality teams will evaluate the model in root-cause investigations, corrective and preventive action documentation, and batch-release decisions, according to the company’s announcement. (money.usnews.com) ### What exactly is Karpathy being hired to do? Anthropic said Karpathy will be part of its pretraining team and will build a group focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research. CNBC reported Karpathy said in a post on X that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative” and that he was excited “to get back to R&D.” (news.bms.com) TechCrunch reported Karpathy is working on pretraining under team lead Nick Joseph. Anthropic described pretraining as the compute-intensive phase in which large training runs give Claude its core capabilities. ### Why does the pairing of these two announcements matter now? May 19 and May 20 brought Anthropic two separate pieces of news: a broad enterprise deployment at a large pharmaceutical company and a high-profile research hire. (news.bms.com) Reuters said Bristol Myers is making Claude available across a regulated global business, while Anthropic said Karpathy is joining work tied directly to model development. CNBC reported Anthropic said Karpathy starts this week. Bristol Myers said the company will evaluate Claude in trial documentation, regulatory submissions and manufacturing-quality processes as the rollout expands across its operations. (cnbc.com) ### What comes next in the rollout and at Anthropic? Bristol Myers said the next phase is evaluation of Claude across priority workflows in research, development, manufacturing and quality, including documentation tied to clinical studies and regulatory filings. (techcrunch.com) The company did not disclose financial terms of the Anthropic agreement. Anthropic said Karpathy began work this week on pretraining research. (money.usnews.com) His role, as described by the company, centers on building a team that uses Claude to accelerate that research effort. (news.bms.com) (cnbc.com)