AI company SandboxAQ has partnered with Anthropic to bring its advanced drug discovery and materials science models into the Claude chatbot, enabling researchers to access complex scientific tools through simple natural language instead of specialised computing systems. The integration aims to make scientific research more accessible for pharmaceutical companies and scientists by removing the need for technical coding or dedicated infrastructure.
Drug discovery is typically a long and expensive process, often taking years and billions of dollars to identify viable molecules. SandboxAQ said its models, now available through Claude, will help reduce this burden by allowing users to run simulations and analyses through conversational prompts.
The company’s technology is based on “large quantitative models” (LQMs), which are physics-grounded systems designed to perform quantum chemistry calculations, molecular dynamics simulations, and microkinetics analysis. These capabilities allow researchers to predict how molecules behave before conducting physical lab experiments, potentially reducing time and cost in drug and materials development.
SandboxAQ, chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and backed by over $950 million in funding, said the Claude integration removes the need for specialised infrastructure previously required to operate its models.
According to company executives, this marks the first instance where a frontier quantitative model has been directly integrated with a frontier large language model for conversational scientific use, allowing researchers to interact with advanced simulations more naturally and efficiently.
