Claude Science Launches in Beta; Week 27 Delivers Background Reliability; Gemini 3.5 Pro Slips to July

TL;DR: Anthropic's Claude Science workbench launches in beta today with 60+ science database connectors; Claude Code Week 27 ships background session reliability; Gemini 3.5 Pro is confirmed delayed to July.

Claude Science is live. Anthropic launched Claude Science today at "The Briefing: AI for Science," announcing a research workbench that puts Claude alongside 60+ pre-configured scientific databases — genomics, proteomics, structural biology, single-cell, and cheminformatics — in one auditable environment. It runs Opus 4.8 (not a new model) and is open in beta to Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise subscribers. Anthropic is also funding up to 50 external research projects at $30K each (apply by July 15). The architecture — curated domain connectors + Claude + auditable, re-runnable results — is the same pattern teams are already building with MCP. Seeing Anthropic ship it as a vertical product confirms that connector-first workbenches are the template for domain AI.

Why it matters: The connector ecosystem model validates the MCP-plus-Claude architecture for domain verticals; if you're building a specialized AI product, this is Anthropic's playbook.

Claude Code Week 27 (v2.1.196). Long-running background sessions now survive process restarts, updates, and stops on all platforms (including Windows). New: org admins can set a default model in the console, visible as "Org default" in /model; sessions get readable auto-generated names; file attachments are Cmd/Ctrl-clickable to reveal locally. See the full changelog.

Why it matters: Background session reliability directly unblocks long-running agent tasks in CI pipelines that previously needed restart logic.

Gemini 3.5 Pro slips to July. Google's 2M-context frontier model, promised at I/O for June, is confirmed delayed. Gemini Flash 3.5 (launched May 19, $1.50/$9.00 per million tokens) remains the live API option.

Sources: Claude Science announcement | TechCrunch | Claude Code changelog | Gemini delay