By Reuters | Updated: April 15, 2026
April 14 (Reuters) – Anthropic on Tuesday added Novartis’ (NOVN.S) Chief Executive Officer Vas Narasimhan to its board of directors, making him the first executive from the pharmaceutical industry to join the AI startup’s governing body.
- Narasimhan joins Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, President Daniela Amodei, Confluent CEO Jay Kreps, Netflix (NFLX.O) chairman Reed Hastings, and others on the board.
- This marks the second new board addition after the Claude chatbot developer added Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft (MSFT.O) executive to its board in February.
- Narasimhan has been appointed to Anthropic’s board by the Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent body whose members have no financial stake in the company.
- Anthropic is reportedly weighing an initial public offering that could take place as early as this year.
- In a LinkedIn post, the Novartis CEO said that “working across medicine, innovation, and global health has helped me realize that technology creates the most value when it’s deployed responsibly.”
- “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” Narasimhan noted, adding “what matters just as much is how these tools are built, governed, and ultimately applied in the real world.”
Reporting by Kunal Das in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber
© Thomson Reuters 2026
