Anthropic announced the Life Sciences Verification Program (LSVP) on Sep 17, 2026, a beta program that grants verified life science organizations access to its Mythos, Opus and Sonnet model families under safeguards refined to be more permissive for biology-related work.
The program is open to teams and institutions, and applications are now open to the broader life science community after dozens of organizations were onboarded through an early-access phase. Anthropic said it expects to enroll hundreds of organizations within the first week and plans to scale the program further to support the majority of the life science community in the coming weeks.
Two Grant Types, Four Surfaces
LSVP issues two kinds of grants: Standard Use and High-risk Use. Both are usable through all four supported product surfaces, which are Claude Science, Claude.ai, Claude Code and the API.
Standard Use grants are intended to suit most life science work, including the majority of biology research and development workflows, and can be extended to entire teams for diverse daily workloads. Anthropic said it expects Standard Use to cover the majority of access needs. These grants are renewed once a year and give access to the Mythos, Opus and Sonnet models with refined classifiers that are more permissive for science tasks than those on generally available models. Standard Use grants apply to Mythos 5.1, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 today, and to future models as they launch.
The design goal is breadth. Anthropic said Standard Use is meant to enable the full range of life science activities, including basic science, research and development, supply chain and manufacturing, clinical development, quality assurance, regulatory affairs, and investing and diligence.
High-risk Use is an add-on grant for teams working in areas blocked under Standard Use. It removes all safeguards that block life sciences requests, applies to a single research project rather than a full team, and must be renewed every six months. High-risk grants for Claude Opus 5 and Claude Sonnet 5 are available today.
Mythos is treated differently. Anthropic said it is working with the US government to make high-risk grants more broadly available for Claude Mythos, but that at launch they will remain limited to a small set of entities with additional vetting.
A typical scenario, according to the announcement, is a single researcher with dual-use work holding one Standard Use grant for daily activities and one or more High-risk Use grants for specific projects, such as characterizing how one specific family of viral vectors is recognized by human immune pathways.
All other safeguards, such as cyber classifiers, remain in place under LSVP grants.
What the Program Unblocks
The generally available Fable models carry stricter safeguards that block many life science tasks. LSVP is built to enable work currently blocked there, including drug discovery, research biology, clinical development and manufacturing.
Anthropic framed the program as serving teams of all kinds, from academic labs and startups to pharmaceutical companies. Verification includes review of research credentials, security standards and ethical research oversight.
Three early participants gave statements in the announcement.
"Xaira is making biology more computable, generating biological data at unprecedented scale and building foundation models of cell, protein and disease biology that turn it into the next generation of life-changing medicines. We're excited to put Anthropic's frontier models to work across our drug discovery engine, and we believe pairing trusted access with intelligence is the right way to realize AI's promise in biology," Xaira Therapeutics said.
"Edison's mission is to accelerate science and the discovery and development of new medicines. With the Life Sciences Verification Program, we are excited to be able to bring Anthropic's most intelligent models to bear on these problems. We look forward to collaborating with Anthropic further to end disease and improve the lives of patients everywhere," Edison Scientific said.
"At Manifold Bio, we're building a massively parallel interface into living systems to enable powerful AI to create medicines. We look forward to putting frontier intelligence to work safely in our engine, and we welcome Anthropic's approach of pairing access with accountability," Manifold Bio said.
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Three Threat Models, One Monitoring Shift
Anthropic tied the program's safeguards to a recent threat report showing increasingly sophisticated misuse attempts on its platform, including attempts that could support biological weapons development.
The company said that in biology it is often not possible to differentiate between valid work, such as researching a viral pathogen to develop vaccines, and harm, such as trying to increase the transmissibility of a virus maliciously. It added that the most concerning threat models are ones where valid access has been diverted or overtaken by an actor with bad intent, and that insider threats and rogue-use have been major factors in significant biosafety incidents and scares.
LSVP safeguards are aimed at three threat models. The first is access compromise, in which malware or account takeover diverts access to a bad actor. The second is insider threats, meaning rogue or coerced employees intentionally taking malicious action or diverting access. The third is agent misuse, in which agents, especially in swarms or over long-horizon tasks, take unintended dangerous actions.
The safeguards are built around a concept of shared responsibility, monitoring usage against intended use-case in close collaboration with enterprise CISOs. Because LSVP organizations are vetted for life sciences credibility and oversight, they can specify for themselves what constitutes safe usage for teams or projects within their program. Each entity's access is tied to use cases specified in grant applications.
Anthropic said it continuously monitors LSVP traffic to identify usage or patterns outside the stated safe scope. Should unauthorized activity occur, the company said it can flag cases to organization admins to take action within pre-agreed timeframes for triaging and remediating incidents.
Applicants are asked to describe use cases at a high level, like what one would share in a job listing, and not to include any sensitive information or intellectual property.
The monitoring model marks a shift. Serious misuse is often spread across many requests and sessions to look disconnected and evade detection, so LSVP moves safeguards from real-time blocking to offline monitoring that can identify potential misuse across patterns of behavior. That shift lets legitimate work proceed with fewer interruptions but requires retaining data associated with flagged activity for review.
For LSVP traffic, data retention is required for 30 days to do that monitoring effectively. Anthropic said the data is strictly compartmentalized and cannot be used for model training or accessed by members of its life sciences research teams.
For organizations that qualify, Anthropic said it is working to understand how LSVP can integrate with features from its Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS) systems.
Availability Limits at Launch
LSVP is available today in the first-party console for API usage and in Claude for Enterprise and Team plans. Anthropic said it does not yet support individual plans but is working to expand access for these users, with plans to extend access to individual Pro and Max plans over time.
The program is not yet available on third-party platforms. As a beta, it is also not available for BAA-enabled organizations, and customers with PHI data should use separate non-BAA organizations with non-HIPAA.
Grant switching works differently by surface. In the API and Claude Science, users can switch between grants natively. In Claude.ai and Claude Code, initially only a preselected default grant applies, except while using Claude Code with API authentication. Anthropic said this should be fine for the vast majority of users, who will only ever require a Standard Use grant, and that it will improve support and portability of these LSVP features over time.
Anthropic described the program as part of broader efforts to support the life sciences community in a shared mission to accelerate curing disease and improving human health. It said it will share more about new products, research collaborations and improvements to the program in the coming months.
Organizations interested in applying can submit an application through the link provided in the announcement.