Anthropic and Gates Foundation commit $200 million to expand AI for public good in health, education

Anthropic, Gates Foundation launch $200 million partnership for AI in health, education - The Economic Times

Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have pledged $200 million to back artificial intelligence-related public goods and areas including health and education, they said on Thursday. Support from Anthropic's technical staff and usage credits for its Claude AI will account for its half of the financial commitment, while the Bill Gates co-founded Gates Foundation will provide ⁠grant funding, ⁠program design and expertise, officials told Reuters. The commitment will span four years. The news follows a $50 million pact that the Gates Foundation and OpenAI announced in January to support 1,000 African clinics and communities with AI by 2028. Against a backdrop of fears that AI could displace jobs and widen inequality, the new partnership is hoping to ensure the technology benefits more people. One area of ⁠focus is language accessibility. AI systems have performed poorly in writing and translating dozens of African languages, so Anthropic and the foundation want to ⁠support better data collection and labeling that would be released publicly to help improve models across the industry, said Janet Zhou, a Gates Foundation director. Another area under consideration is releasing so-called knowledge graphs that could help AI systems better meet the needs of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, Zhou said. The public-goods focus has come from "the needs of different partners and governments, including some of the fears that they may have around proprietary lock-in and sovereignty," Zhou said. One initiative will equip research centers to use Claude to predict drug candidates for treating HPV and ⁠preeclampsia, diseases that have been less commercially attractive for pharmaceutical companies to research, Zhou and Anthropic's Elizabeth Kelly said. Anthropic, a startup backed by Google and Amazon.com whose value has soared on demand for its AI and coding tools, is embracing the work to fulfill what Kelly described as its founding mission to benefit humanity. "This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," said Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team.

Anthropic and Gates Foundation Form $200 Million Health-Focused Pact | PYMNTS.com

The partnership will combine grant funding with technical support and usage credits for Anthropic's Claude AI model to "extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not," according to a Thursday (May 14) announcement. The biggest portion of the project is aimed at global health, especially in low- and middle-income countries where an estimated 4.6 billion people lack access to essential medical services, per the announcement. The organizations plan to use AI to accelerate the development of vaccines and therapies for neglected diseases. "Together, we will explore how AI can make it faster and easier for scientists to screen potential vaccine candidates, including vaccines that protect against diseases like polio, computationally before moving into pre-clinical development," the announcement said. "This could help shorten the early-stage development timeline." Anthropic is also working with the Institute for Disease Modeling, a research group within the Gates Foundation, to improve the forecasts that decide where and how to deploy treatment for illnesses like malaria and tuberculosis, according to the announcement. Beyond healthcare, the partnership will also develop tools to improve "educational outcomes" for K-12 students in the United States, sub-Saharan Africa and India, while also supporting programs to encourage economic mobility, the announcement said. The effort is the latest in a series of examples of AI being deployed for health-related discoveries. For example, it was reported this week that Moderna is partnering with Anthropic rival OpenAI to develop new drugs. Last month, it was reported that the Mayo Clinic has developed an AI model called REDMOD that can detect pancreatic cancer on routine abdominal CT scans up to three years before a clinical diagnosis. The model can spot subtle signs of disease before tumors are visible, when curative treatment could still be possible. Researchers analyzed nearly 2,000 CT scans, including scans from patients later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that were originally interpreted as normal. REDMOD identified 73% of those prediagnostic cancers at a median of around 16 months before diagnosis, close to double the detection rate of specialists examining the same scans without the help of AI.