SandboxAQ has partnered with Anthropic to integrate its scientific AI models into Claude, placing drug discovery and materials science tools behind a conversational interface that does not require specialized computing infrastructure to use. The arrangement allows users to interact with SandboxAQ's proprietary large quantitative models, known as LQMs, through natural language prompts rather than dedicated technical systems.

The LQMs are physics-grounded and built on rules of the physical world rather than patterns in text. They can run quantum chemistry calculations, simulate molecular dynamics and microkinetics, and predict how candidate molecules are likely to behave before laboratory experiments. SandboxAQ states that the models are trained on real-world lab data and scientific equations, and are engineered for what the company calls the quantitative economy, a sector it values at over $50 trillion spanning biopharma, financial services, energy, and advanced materials.

"For the first time, we have a frontier [quantitative] model on a frontier LLM that someone can access in natural language," said Nadia Harhen, general manager of AI simulation at SandboxAQ. Previously, users of the LQMs had to provide their own digital infrastructure to run them. SandboxAQ regards the interface, rather than the underlying models, as the main bottleneck in AI-driven drug discovery.

Finding a single viable molecule can take a decade and cost billions of dollars, and most drug candidates do not become viable products. SandboxAQ's customers include computational scientists, research scientists, and experimentalists who generally work at large pharmaceutical or industrial companies to search for new materials that can become marketable products. "Our customers come to us because they've tried all the other software out there, and the complexity of their problem is such that it didn't work or didn't yield positive results for them when that translation went to take place in the real world," Harhen said.

SandboxAQ was founded roughly five years ago as an Alphabet spinout and has raised more than $950 million from investors. Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, serves as chairman of the company, which has built multiple business lines, including a cybersecurity business. Chai Discovery and Isomorphic Labs have also focused on developing advanced scientific AI models for drug discovery.