Anthropic open-sources optimized biomolecular models: Claude sped up computations fourfold

Anthropic has released optimized versions of more than 30 open models that biologists use to predict protein structure, design molecules and make sense of genomic data. The optimization was done by Claude itself, within the Claude Science research effort. Such speedups are usually done by hand: a team spends weeks on a single model, and the work rarely carries over from one model to another.

According to the company, the models got roughly four times faster on average with minimal loss of accuracy, and nearly twice as fast in a mode that produces a fully identical result. Part of the gain came from portable FlashPairformer kernels that accelerate key operations, and the rest from targeted tuning of each model. The whole effort took less than four weeks.

A separate result is the memory-efficient Big mode: it makes it possible to correctly compute systems larger than 10,000 tokens (amino acids, nucleotides, atoms of small molecules and ions) on a single NVIDIA node, whereas such calculations previously had to be spread across several nodes. The paper names human mitochondrial complex I, the chaperonin complex TRiC, the proteasome and the bacterial ribosome — the predicted structures closely matched experimental ones.

Alongside this, Anthropic and Adaptyv Bio announced a protein design competition. Participants are offered five tasks at the edge of current capabilities, and the organizers promise up to $1 million in Claude credits, Modal compute credits and DNA from Twist Bioscience, plus laboratory testing of more than 5,000 submitted variants.

The point here is not an individual record but the cost of entry. The biomolecular models themselves were in use before — what changes is accessibility: the code is open, hardware requirements are noticeably lower, and calculations that until recently ran into budget limits and cluster access are now within reach of a small lab or team.

One simple caveat: the numbers are Anthropic's own measurements, and design assessments remain computational — the final word belongs to laboratory verification.

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Translation editor: Салтанов А.