Vasant Narasimhan, CEO, Novartis
Anthropic added Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board on April 14, 2026. With his appointment, directors chosen by the company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust now hold a majority of board seats.
Narasimhan is a physician-scientist who has overseen the development and approval of more than 35 novel medicines and vaccines, and he joins the board as Anthropic expands its ambitions in healthcare and life sciences. Earlier this month, the company apparently acquired the stealth biotech Coefficient Bio for $400 billion.
“Vas brings something rare to our board,” said co-founder and president Daniela Amodei in prepared remarks. “He’s overseen the development and approval of more than 35 novel medicines for the benefit of patients around the world in one of the most regulated industries. Getting powerful new technology to people safely and at scale is what we think about every day at Anthropic. Vas has been doing exactly that for years.”
Narasimhan framed the role through a similar lens. In healthcare, AI is already accelerating some of our hardest scientific challenges – from deepening our understanding of disease biology to helping identify promising targets and design better medicines. But speed alone isn’t the goal. What matters just as much is how these tools are built, governed, and ultimately applied in the real world,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Anthropic is demonstrating that AI can be both transformative and responsible. I’m looking forward to contributing to its mission and to helping shape what the future of AI should look like,” he continued.
The hire lines up with Anthropic’s recent push into healthcare and life sciences. The company launched Claude for Life Sciences in October 2025 and followed with Claude for Healthcare in January 2026, which added HIPAA-ready infrastructure and tools aimed at clinical, regulatory and scientific workflows.
What the Trust actually is
Anthropic is structured as a public-benefit corporation, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust exists to represent the company’s mission rather than investor economics. With Narasimhan’s appointment, directors chosen by the company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust now hold a majority. The appointment crosses a governance threshold written into Anthropic’s founding documents but not fully exercised until now.
The Trust is a separate legal body that holds a special class of Anthropic stock whose only purpose is electing directors. Its trustees hold no equity in the company, draw no salary from it and are selected by each other rather than by shareholders. The three current trustees are Buddy Shah of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security, and former California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, now president of the Carnegie Endowment.
Anthropic has publicly attributed three board seats to Trust appointments: Confluent CEO Jay Kreps, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and now Narasimhan. The company says Trust-appointed directors are now a majority, which on a seven-seat board implies a fourth appointment, though Anthropic has not specified which of the remaining directors, Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Yasmin Razavi or former White House official Chris Liddell, falls on which side of the line.
