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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pictured during a visit at the company’s electric car plant in Gruenheide near Berlin, eastern Germany, on March 13, 2024, as employees resumed work after production had to be halted due to a suspected arson attack that caused a power outage. 

Sebastian Gollnow | Getty Images

Elon Musk on Wednesday visited the Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin, which was forced to halt production last week after losing power during a suspected arson attack.

Pictures show Musk waving to workers as he arrived at the factory in German state Brandenburg and addressing them on stage in a tent where employees gathered to meet him.

Local media also reported that Musk told the crowd “I love you” in German, but that his further comments were drowned out by a factory vehicle parking in front of journalists and blasting music.

Tesla workers stand outside they wait for arrival of Tesla head Elon Musk outside the Tesla Gigafactory on March 13, 2024 near Gruenheide, Germany.

Maja Hitij | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Musk is expected to meet regional politicians during his visit to Germany, local media said, citing state government sources. CNBC could not independently verify the reports.

Last week, the Gigafactory was left without power and had to temporarily stop production after a suspected arson on an electric substation close by. Tesla said that the incident was aimed at the company, in a statement on social media platform X.

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Tesla plant in Gruenheide, Germany, on Wednesday, March 13, 2024.

Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Left-wing extremist group ‘Vulkangruppe’ claimed responsibility for the attack in a letter posted online, criticizing Tesla’s environmental competencies. Regional authorities are still investigating the case.

The Brandenburg factory is slated for expansion, but the project has met significant resistance from locals and environmental groups, as it would mean the destruction of forests in the area. Activists have set up camp near the factory in protest.

The plant was able to rejoin the power grid earlier this week. Production resumed at the Gigafactory on Wednesday, Michaela Schmitz, chair of the works council at the plant, told local radio channel rbb24, according to a CNBC translation.

Employees received their full salaries during the production outage, she added.

A banner with the words “Elon” and “Eloff” hangs in the camp of the “Stop Tesla” initiative in a pine forest near Fangschleuse near the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg plant.

Sebastian Gollnow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Tesla Manufacturing on Wednesday shared a video of the inside of a factory on social media platform X, with the caption: “We are back.” The post was shared by Musk, who also thanked the team at the Gigafactory.

“Thanks to the hard work of the Tesla Giga Berlin team and support from the community, the factory is back online!,” he said.

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Anthropic launches Claude Life Sciences to give researchers an AI efficiency boost

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Anthropic launches Claude Life Sciences to give researchers an AI efficiency boost

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology in the advancement of scientific discovery. 

Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools that are commonly used in labs during research and development.

It will be able to help researchers through all stages of the discovery process, from carrying out literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more, Anthropic said.

The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the sector, and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as its head of biology and life sciences. 

“Now is the threshold moment for us where we’ve decided this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview. “We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding.”

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Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years.

The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is “significantly better” at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.  

Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish. 

That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.

“We’re willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.

In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies. 

The scientist was able to query her lab’s data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission. 

Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require “days” of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes. 

Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it’s also under “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said.

Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piece by piece” to determine where AI could be most useful.

“We’re here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it’s done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.

WATCH: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

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