Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have announced a new US$200 million partnership aimed at supporting the development of AI tools and public-interest infrastructure across healthcare and education.

The four-year initiative will combine grant funding from the Gates Foundation with technical support and usage credits for Anthropic’s Claude AI platform.

The partnership will focus on improving accessibility and reducing inequality in AI deployment, particularly across low-resource and underserved regions.

One major area of focus will be healthcare innovation, including support for research centres using AI to identify potential drug candidates for conditions such as human papillomavirus (HPV) and pre-eclampsia – diseases that have historically attracted less commercial research interest from pharmaceutical companies.

The initiative will also explore how AI systems can better support healthcare and education delivery in regions including Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Officials involved in the programme said improving language accessibility would be another priority, particularly as many AI systems currently perform poorly when translating or processing dozens of African languages. 

The partnership plans to support better data collection and labelling to improve AI model performance across the wider industry.

The announcement follows a separate $50 million collaboration between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI earlier this year, which aims to support AI deployment across 1,000 African clinics and communities by 2028.

The growing use of AI within clinical decision-making, triage, diagnostics, and remote healthcare delivery is likely to remain a key area of interest, particularly as systems become more integrated into cross-border and digitally enabled models of care.

Anthropic’s Elizabeth Kelly told Reuters that the initiative aligned closely with the company’s founding mission to ensure AI technologies are developed in ways that “benefit humanity”.

The organisations said the programme would also consider concerns around technological sovereignty, interoperability, and overreliance on proprietary systems as healthcare providers and governments increasingly adopt AI-enabled infrastructure.