ICON partners with Anthropic to embed Claude AI across clinical trial lifecycle

ICON plc announced a multi‑year collaboration with AI firm Anthropic to integrate the Claude large‑language model into its Orbis platform, covering the entire clinical trial lifecycle. The partnership will develop four capabilities—site intelligence and study planning, predictive trial intelligence, protocol optimisation, and ecosystem integration—aimed at improving site selection, detecting enrolment risks, and accelerating study start‑up. ICON plans to embed Claude into its OneSearch and OnePlan tools and roll it out across the organisation for developers, knowledge teams and scientific staff.

Barry Balfe, chief executive officer of ICON, said: “We are determined to lead AI acceleration of clinical trials. Working with Anthropic gives us direct access to frontier AI capability and the people who build it.” The collaboration builds on ICON’s secure, governed, agentic AI platform Orbis and is intended to boost productivity and decision‑making for trial sponsors.