The country’s largest healthcare company is placing a bet on Anthropic.
Optum, part of UnitedHealth Group, is partnering with Anthropic “to responsibly bring AI to healthcare to help people live healthier lives, reduce the administrative burden, and make the health system work better for everyone,” Optum confirmed July 13. “Privacy, safety and human oversight remain foundational. AI supports clinical judgment, it does not replace it.”
Optum Insight CEO Sandeep Dadlani wrote on LinkedIn that the company will leverage Claude to reduce administrative burden and “make everyday interactions clearer for the people we serve.”
“Anthropic shares our conviction that AI in healthcare must be held to the highest standard,” Mr. Dadlani said July 13. “I’m energized by what we’ll build together.”
As of this article’s publication, Optum did not offer more information about specific use cases, the timeline for deployment or how Anthropic would interact with other AI systems at the company.
UnitedHealth has been investing heavily in AI, saying it would deploy $3 billion toward the technology this year and next. At a June product showcase, UnitedHealth said it has more than 1,000 use cases in production across the enterprise as it aims to automate the transactional core of its businesses. At the time, Mr. Dadlani emphasized the Optum Real solution for claims processing and Optum Integrity One, a revenue cycle management platform with more than 100 clients that he called “the hottest-selling AI product right now for us.”
UnitedHealth’s size and technological capabilities position the company as a marquee target for AI companies seeking a greater foothold within the healthcare industry. Optum alone touts the nation’s largest physician network and owns the largest claims clearinghouse, Change Healthcare, which was hit by a 2024 ransomware attack that ranks as the largest breach in healthcare history.
Just days apart, OpenAI for Healthcare and Claude for Healthcare launched in January, offering a host of products to support administrative and clinical work at healthcare organizations. In the spring, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Clinicians, and Anthropic later said its new frontier AI models have been speeding up drug design. In July, Anthropic said it is working with technology services company UST to integrate Claude with CarePath, a platform for claims processing, care management and member services.
A handful of health systems have also been leaning on OpenAI directly, while Phoenix-based Banner Health has been an early enterprise Anthropic adopter.
UnitedHealth’s use of AI in coverage decisions has been litigated and criticized, perhaps most prominently in an ongoing class action from the families of deceased Medicare Advantage members that alleges an AI tool under Optum drove post-acute care coverage denials. Optum has denied the allegations, saying that “medical necessity determinations are made by qualified physicians following CMS guidance — not AI.”
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