Anthropic just announced Built with Claude: Life Sciences, a global virtual hackathon running July 7-13 in partnership with the Gladstone Institutes. The prize pool is $100,000 in API credits, applications close this Sunday, and the tools at the center of it are Claude Science and Claude Code. This is not a general-purpose build competition -- it is a focused push to get researchers and builders working at the intersection of AI and biomedicine.
The Setup
The hackathon is organized through Cerebral Valley, the same community behind Anthropic's previous virtual build weeks. Previous events in this series selected 500 builders from more than 20,000 applicants and gave them a week to build with Claude Code. The Life Sciences edition narrows the focus: participants will build with Claude Science, Anthropic's brand-new AI workbench for researchers, and Claude Code.
The timing is deliberate. Since launching its life sciences efforts last fall, Anthropic has worked to improve model capabilities, make connections to the scientific ecosystem via MCPs and skills, and launch partnerships -- and Claude Science is its most significant expansion of those efforts: an app that integrates the tools and packages researchers most commonly use, produces auditable artifacts, and provides flexible access to computing resources.
What Is Claude Science, Exactly?
Claude Science is not a new model. The platform leverages existing Claude models like Claude Opus 4.8. What it adds is a purpose-built research environment. Scientific research is often tedious -- researchers must work across dozens of databases, each with their own schema, contend with file formats that require bespoke data pipelines and viewers, and transition between a roster of tools: PubMed, Jupyter, R, a cluster terminal, and more. Claude Science collapses that stack into a single agent-driven workspace.
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