Anthropic and OpenEvidence bring free medical AI to about 100 countries

Doctors in about 100 low and middle income countries will soon be able to access OpenEvidence, a clinical search tool already used by physicians in the US and Europe for free. The medical platform will run on Anthropic’s AI models, with the two companies saying the rollout is aimed at geographical locations where limited access to medical journals, specialists and continuing education can make patient care more difficult.

The OpenEvidence platform helps doctors find answers to clinical questions by searching peer-reviewed research journals and known treatment guidelines. The company’s founder and CEO, Daniel Nadler, stated that the platform uses multiple sources such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the NCCN guidelines in its responses.

The rollout includes countries such as Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. In the US, doctors made 42 million queries through OpenEvidence in August alone, Nadler told Reuters. He also estimated that several hundred million Americans will have been treated in 2026 by doctors who used the medical platform.

Why Anthropic is giving it away

Anthropic President Daniela Amodei said the project would probably not have happened via normal market incentives alone. She told Reuters that the technology has become capable enough for the initiative, but that “market incentives by themselves would not cause it to happen” without a philanthropic push.

Nadler summed up the goal simply, stating that “Access to medical knowledge shouldn’t depend on geography.”

Unreliable electricity is a major challenge in many of the targeted low-resource settings, and a positive of the platform as explained by Nadler is that most of the doctors still have access to smartphones even when clinics have power inconsistencies.

Can the tool work outside wealthy healthcare systems?

Critics have warned that medical AI tools trained largely on evidence from wealthier countries may not always fit healthcare systems with different practices and conditions, Reuters reported. OpenEvidence says it is addressing the issue by adapting the system to each region instead of taking a simple one-size-fits-all approach.

“One hundred percent of what we are developing for these areas is designed to be context adaptive,” Nadler said.

Earlier this year, the company worked with healthcare organizations in Rwanda and Botswana to adapt its tools.

The tool could also be particularly useful for doctors who have limited access to major medical journals. Dr. Ahmed Bendary, a cardiologist at Benha University in Egypt, told Reuters that the expansion is especially important for doctors in places where access to medical research is limited.

Anthropic is pushing deeper into healthcare

Anthropic announced a laboratory for physical biology research aimed at drug development last week, as previously reported by Cryptopolitan. The Wall Street Journal also reported in August that Anthropic sees its healthcare and biology work as a way to improve public sentiment around AI, one of the arguments it has made to investors ahead of a planned public listing.

The bigger test for the OpenEvidence medical platform will rest on whether the tool built largely on medical evidence from wealthy countries can work just as well for doctors in less affluent places such as Mongolia, Sudan and the other countries designated in the launch.