AI companies are sprinting toward healthcare, and the feature race is officially on.
Just one week after OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health, Anthropic announced its own health-focused expansion, launching Claude for Healthcare and broadening Claude’s capabilities across providers, payers, and everyday patients.
Healthcare is shaping up to be one of the most important battlegrounds in consumer AI, because whoever owns healthcare workflows does not just win users, they win daily habits.
OpenAI Lit the Match
Last week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health after reporting that ChatGPT already answers about 40 million health-related queries per day.
The new experience is consumer-focused and allows users to:
connect health apps
upload medical records securely
have the chatbot analyze and explain medical information
The pitch is simple: give people a health assistant that can turn confusing paperwork into plain English.
Anthropic’s Move: Claude for Healthcare
Now Anthropic is responding with Claude for Healthcare, which it says offers similar features, but with a heavier tilt toward the professional side of medicine.
Anthropic described it as a set of tools and resources for:
healthcare providers
payers
consumers
All delivered through HIPAA-ready products, meaning the company is aiming directly at real clinical adoption, not just curiosity-driven symptom searches.
What Providers Can Do With It
Anthropic said Claude for Healthcare can help providers handle some of the most time-consuming administrative work in medicine, including:
speeding up prior authorization requests
building claims appeals
coordinating patient care
Translation: less paperwork, less back-and-forth, and faster decisions, which is exactly where AI can create leverage inside healthcare systems.
What Patients Get
For patients, the focus is similar to OpenAI’s approach, but framed as broader health monitoring and record analysis.
Anthropic said patients will be able to:
connect to systems to access medical records and lab results
securely share data from health apps
detect patterns from personal health metrics
That last part is key. AI is not just becoming a medical dictionary, it’s becoming a personal health dashboard that can interpret trends over time.
Life Sciences Expansion Too
Anthropic also expanded Claude for Life Sciences, adding new integrations with additional scientific platforms to help with:
clinical trial management
regulatory workflows
That pushes Claude deeper into the pharma and biotech pipeline, where documentation, compliance, and trial coordination can be brutally complex.
Bottom line: OpenAI made healthcare the next big consumer AI use case, and Anthropic just followed with a more enterprise-focused twist. The winner here will not just be whoever has the smartest model, it’ll be whoever plugs AI into the places where medicine actually happens.