ICON announces multi-year collaboration with Anthropic to bring frontier AI to clinical trials

Key Terms

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An agentic AI platform is software that can set and pursue goals, make decisions, and carry out tasks across digital tools with minimal human direction — like a self-directed assistant that plans, acts, and learns. For investors it matters because such platforms can multiply productivity, automate complex workflows, and create new revenue streams, while also raising operational, safety and regulatory risks that can affect a company’s costs and growth prospects.

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Protocol optimisation is the process of reviewing and adjusting a defined set of procedures or rules—such as clinical trial plans, operational workflows, or technical standards—to make them more efficient, safer, or more likely to achieve intended outcomes. Like refining a recipe to get consistent results, optimising a protocol can shorten timelines, reduce costs and risks, or improve the chance of meeting regulatory or performance goals, which can affect a project’s schedule, budget and value to investors.

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DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ICON plc (NASDAQ: ICLR) today announced a multi-year collaboration with Anthropic to bring Claude’s AI capabilities across the clinical trial lifecycle. The collaboration further advances ICON’s digital innovation and AI strategy, and builds on Orbis – ICON’s secure, governed, agentic AI platform.

Through this collaboration, ICON will work closely with Anthropic’s Life Sciences research team to explore and apply cutting-edge technologies that can accelerate innovation across clinical development.

With support from Anthropic, ICON will develop four production capabilities within Orbis:

• Site intelligence and study planning: powering ICON’s OneSearch and OnePlan tools with frontier model reasoning to sharpen site selection and study feasibility.

• Orbis predictive intelligence: enabling real-time detection of enrolment risks, trends and operational signals across active studies.

• Protocol optimisation: applying AI to protocol design and scenario modelling to reduce amendments and accelerate study startup.

• Ecosystem integration: integrating ICON’s clinical expertise into client systems, allowing them to securely access ICON’s insights directly within Claude.

ICON will deploy Claude across the organisation through a targeted, role-based rollout: Claude Code for developers, Claude for knowledge teams, and Claude Science for scientific and clinical teams for maximum value creation.

The collaboration with Anthropic directly supports the three foundational areas of ICON’s AI strategy:

• Anthropic’s frontier models will strengthen the intelligence layer that powers Orbis, connecting ICON’s expertise, data and AI across the trial lifecycle so that teams can make better and faster decisions for customers.

• The deployment of Claude capabilities across ICON’s developer and knowledge teams will drive productivity by automating high-volume, repeatable activity and redirecting human expertise to higher-value work.

• Working with Anthropic, ICON will develop and deploy domain-specific agents embedded directly within clinical development workflows.

Barry Balfe, Chief Executive Officer of ICON plc, commented: “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. By combining ICON’s clinical development expertise, global delivery model and proprietary trial intelligence with Anthropic’s frontier AI capabilities, we believe we can help sponsors make better decisions earlier, execute studies with greater precision and ultimately accelerate the delivery of medicines to patients.”

Pip White, Head of Ireland, UK and Northern Europe, Anthropic added: “AI holds real potential to address long-standing challenges in clinical development and make a measurable difference for patients. Far too often, the barrier to getting medicines to patients faster is operational, not scientific. Take study enrollment as an example - it’s one of the biggest bottlenecks in clinical development and causes delays in up to 80% of trials. This is exactly the kind of operational challenge that ICON's trial-delivery expertise, paired with Claude, is well suited to address."

About ICON plc

ICON plc is a world-leading clinical research organisation. Offering deep operational and medical expertise we accelerate innovation, driving emerging therapies forward to improve patient outcomes. From molecule to medicine, we deliver integrated consulting, clinical development, commercialisation and post-marketing solutions to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, government and public health organisations worldwide. With headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, ICON employed approximately 40,200 employees in 99 locations in 55 countries as at June 30, 2026.

Learn more about the AI at ICON including our Orbis platform:

www.iconplc.com/orbis

www.iconplc.com/ai

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260728449012/en/

Media contacts:
ICON:
Lisa Henry (GMT time zone)
Weber Shandwick (PR adviser)
+447785 458203
lhenry@webershandwick.com

ICON Press Office
iconnews@webershandwick.com

Source: ICON plc