Anthropic and OpenEvidence to give doctors in about 100 countries free AI clinical support

A partnership for clinical decision support

AI startup Anthropic and medical knowledge platform OpenEvidence are collaborating to bring AI-powered clinical decision support to physicians in regions that lack access to the technology, the companies said on Tuesday.

OpenEvidence answers doctors' questions by drawing on peer-reviewed medical research and treatment guidelines. The platform is free to clinicians in the United States and Europe. The new initiative is a specialized version available to healthcare providers for free in dozens of low- and middle-income countries, where limited access to medical literature, specialist expertise and continuing medical education can impair patient care.

According to a list provided by OpenEvidence, the rollout covers about 100 countries, including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. "Access to medical knowledge shouldn't depend on geography," OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler said.

Adapting the system to local conditions

Anthropic's technology will provide back-end support, while OpenEvidence will tailor the system to different regions, taking healthcare infrastructure into account; the companies did not disclose financial terms.

Earlier this year, OpenEvidence said it was working with health organizations in Rwanda and Botswana to adapt its tools for settings where disease patterns, diagnostic resources and available treatments differ markedly from those in wealthier countries. "One hundred percent of what we are building for these places is context adaptive," Nadler said.

Even where medical facilities do not have around-the-clock electricity, most physicians do have smartphones, he said, meaning access to quality medical information that a decade ago would only have been available at leading institutions such as the Mayo Clinic. Anthropic president Daniela Amodei said the structure needed for low-resource regions already exists, but market incentives alone would not have made it happen.

Why it matters

Healthcare systems worldwide are exploring whether generative AI can help address shortages of physicians and specialists. Supporters argue that AI tools help clinicians quickly navigate vast amounts of medical information, while critics caution that systems trained primarily on data from high-income countries may not reflect local practice conditions.

In August alone, US clinicians consulted OpenEvidence 42 million times, according to Nadler. In 2026, several hundred million Americans will have been treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence to help guide care, he said. Dr. Ahmed Bendary, a cardiologist at Benha University in Egypt, said expanding this access beyond the United States and Europe "would be a tremendous leap forward, particularly in regions where institutional subscriptions to major medical journals are limited".