Anthropic adds Novartis CEO to board

Anthropic said on April 14 that its Long-Term Benefit Trust appointed Novartis Chief Executive Officer Vas Narasimhan to the company’s board of directors. (anthropic.com) Narasimhan has led Novartis since February 1, 2018, and Novartis says he now runs a medicines company with more than 77,000 employees, operations in about 120 countries, and medicines reaching more than 300 million patients in 2025. (novartis.com) Anthropic’s board already included Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Yasmin Razavi, Jay Kreps, Reed Hastings, and Chris Liddell before Narasimhan’s appointment. Anthropic said in February that Liddell had joined the board, and in May 2025 it said Hastings had been appointed by the trust. (anthropic.com 1) (anthropic.com 2) Anthropic is structured as a public benefit corporation with a separate Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent group of five financially disinterested members that the company said can select and remove a growing share of directors and is meant to align governance with “the long-term benefit of humanity.” (anthropic.com) The appointment lands as Anthropic pushes deeper into healthcare and life sciences. In January, the company introduced Claude for Healthcare and expanded life-sciences tools for clinical trial management, regulatory work, and connections to systems including Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medidata, and ClinicalTrials.gov. (anthropic.com) Anthropic has also been broadening its leadership and infrastructure as it scales. The company said in October 2025 that Rahul Patil joined as chief technology officer to oversee engineering, infrastructure, inference, data science, and security as Claude expands for enterprise customers. (anthropic.com) Narasimhan is a physician by training, and Novartis says he has overseen approvals for more than 35 novel medicines and vaccines over his career. The company also says he worked on Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, malaria, and tuberculosis in India, Africa, and South America, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. (novartis.com) That gives Anthropic a board member whose career has been built in drug development, public health, and regulated medicine as the company sells more artificial intelligence tools into hospitals, insurers, and life-sciences companies. (anthropic.com) (novartis.com)