OpenEvidence began as a way for a doctor to ask a question and get an answer drawn from peer-reviewed research rather than a search engine. It is free for clinicians in the United States and Europe. Now the company, together with Anthropic, is extending the same service to doctors in parts of the world where the reference library is thin.
The two companies said Tuesday they are collaborating to bring AI-powered clinical decision support to physicians in about 100 low- and middle-income countries, free of charge. The list includes Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia, according to a roster provided by OpenEvidence.
The platform works by answering doctors’ questions with material drawn from peer-reviewed medical literature and treatment guidelines. In August alone, clinicians in the United States consulted it 42 million times, according to OpenEvidence’s founder, Daniel Nadler. He has said that in 2026, several hundred million Americans will be treated by a doctor who used the tool to help guide care.
Nadler is an unusual figure to be running a medical AI company. He trained as a writer and published a poetry collection while completing a doctorate at Harvard, and he later founded Kensho, a financial-data company that S&P Global bought for $550 million in 2018. He started OpenEvidence to give doctors the kind of instant, sourced answer that his earlier work had brought to finance.
The new initiative takes that system to places where the constraints are different. In many of the target countries, access to medical literature is limited, specialist expertise is scarce, and continuing medical education is hard to come by, all of which can directly affect the quality of care patients receive. Nadler framed the effort in simple terms: access to medical knowledge should not depend on geography.
Anthropic will provide the back-end technology, while OpenEvidence will tailor the system to each region, taking local healthcare infrastructure into account. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the arrangement. Anthropic’s president, Daniela Amodei, said the technology has advanced far enough that the structure for such a rollout exists, but that market incentives alone would not have produced it without entrepreneurial and philanthropic effort.
The announcement lands as healthcare systems around the world weigh whether generative AI can ease shortages of physicians and specialists. The World Health Organization has projected a shortfall of millions of health workers in the coming years, concentrated in the same regions the new program targets. Supporters argue that such tools help clinicians navigate vast amounts of medical information quickly. Critics caution that systems trained mostly on data from wealthy countries may not reflect how medicine is actually practiced in poorer ones.
OpenEvidence has been trying to answer that criticism. Earlier this year, the company 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 sharply from those in richer countries. Nadler said everything the company builds for these places is context adaptive.
The practical reach is wider than it may first appear. Even where medical facilities do not have around-the-clock electricity, most physicians carry smartphones, Nadler said, which means a doctor in a remote clinic can reach medical information that a decade ago was available only at institutions such as the Mayo Clinic.
Physicians in the target regions described the change in personal terms. A cardiologist at Benha University in Egypt said expanding access outside the United States and Europe would be a significant step forward, particularly where institutional subscriptions to major medical journals are limited and evidence-based tools are scarce.
Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of AI models, built with an emphasis on safety, and the company has lately pushed its ambitions into biology and medicine. Reuters reported last week that Anthropic had built a laboratory to do physical biology work, part of a broader move into drug science even as some executives and lawmakers call for a slowdown in AI development.
The partnership also shows how quickly the field is moving from demonstrations to deployment. A year ago, clinical AI was largely a research topic. Now it is being shipped to a hundred countries at once, and the question is less whether the software works than whether it holds up outside the hospitals where it was tested.
For OpenEvidence, the bet is that the same model that won over clinicians in Boston and Berlin can serve a physician in Kampala or Ulaanbaatar. For Anthropic, it is a chance to show that its safety-first positioning translates into something concrete. Neither company said how the free rollout will be funded over the long term, or what happens when the pilot countries become paying customers.
