Anthropic’s Bet on the Future of Healthcare | Healthcare and Life Sciences Lead, Sarah Russell

Sarah Russell picked up a phrase at her new job at Anthropic: a "non-regrettable primitive." It's how she describes the kind of infrastructure she thinks Anthropic should be building in healthcare, and it says a lot about how one of the most closely watched companies in health AI is positioning itself.
In this episode, Steve talks with Sarah Russell, MD healthcare and life sciences lead at Anthropic. This conversation comes as Anthropic heads toward what's shaping up to be one of the most anticipated IPOs in years.
We cover:
• What Anthropic is doing in healthcare
• Why HIPAA is struggling to keep up with AI agents
• Where she thinks AI will change care first (it’s not where you'd expect!)
• The two very different bars regulators are weighing AI against, and why the choice matters more than most people realize
• The one piece of advice from her father that still shapes how she builds teams, and what she tells doctors nervous about a career in medicine now

About our guest:
Sarah currently works on healthcare and life sciences projects at Anthropic. She is particularly passionate about research that explores how to make Claude safer and less confidently wrong. Prior to Anthropic, she was at Google X, an innovation hub at Alphabet, where she learned to lead teams of smart engineers building ML- and LLM-based products. Seeing the earliest version of Google’s Med-PaLM summarize a patient chart made her excited about healthcare technology all over again. Prior to Google, she was a CMIO in the VA system and a start-up founder. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Sarah did her internal medicine residency at MGH and completed an MBA at Wharton. She still practices part-time in Urgent Care at Stanford, where she is an Assistant Professor.
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