Anthropic partners with four Australian institutions for AI safety research

On 31 March, Anthropic signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Australian government to cooperate on AI safety research and support the goals of Australia’s National AI Plan. The MOU establishes a formal foundation for collaboration on responsible AI development.

Key commitments include working with Australia's AI Safety Institute on sharing findings, joint safety evaluations, and research collaboration. Anthropic will also share its Economic Index data to track AI's economic impact, initially focusing on natural resources, agriculture, healthcare, and financial services, and is exploring investments in data center infrastructure and energy across Australia.

As part of the broader collaboration, Anthropic is extending its AI for Science program to Australia with an AUD $3 million investment in Claude API credits to four institutions:

• Australian National University (ANU): Using Claude to analyze genetic sequencing data to tackle rare diseases; embedding Claude into computing courses to train next‑generation developers and scientists.
• Garvan Institute of Medical Research:  Accelerating genomic discovery in two projects: one to translate genetic variation into disease insights for new treatments, and another,in collaboration with the Centre for Population Genomics (a joint initiative of Garvan and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute), to automate complex genetic analysis——currently a major bottleneck in diagnosing children with rare genetic conditions.
• Murdoch Children’s Research Institute: Applying Claude to stem cell medicine to improve identification of therapeutic targets for childhood heart disease.
• Curtin University: Using Claude to scale data science research across health sciences, humanities, business, law, science, and engineering via the Curtin Institute for Data Science.

Additionally, Anthropic launched a deep tech startup API credit program for venture‑backed startups in drug discovery, materials science, climate modeling, and medical diagnostics, offering up to USD $50,000 (approx. AUD $72,000) in credits.