A quick primer before the walkthrough:

In plain English: A biopharma-flavored workflow for using Claude to build competitor pipeline briefs from public sources — and to fact-check claims your team has already written.

Key terms:

• Competitive intelligence (CI) — tracking what other companies in your space are doing.
• Pipeline — a company's list of drugs in development.
• Fact-checking prompt — a prompt that asks the AI to verify each claim against sources you provide, rather than generate new text.

What you'll need: A Claude Pro or Team account and public documents (press releases, 10-Ks, ClinicalTrials.gov exports).

Comfort level: No coding. You'll paste text, run prompts, and review Claude's answers.

Competitive intel and fact-checking with Claude

Claude is well-suited to reasoning over messy source material — press releases, 10-Ks, ClinicalTrials.gov records, conference abstracts. This is a lightweight CI workflow that a small biotech can run.

Step 1 — Collect sources

For each competitor, pull:

• Latest 10-K / 20-F (SEC or company IR page)
• Last four press releases
• All active ClinicalTrials.gov records (export as XML or PDF)
• Most recent investor deck

Save as PDFs in one folder.

Step 2 — Structured brief

Upload everything to a single Claude conversation:

Build a competitor brief on [Company X]. Structure:
1. Corporate summary (stage, cash runway, recent financings)
2. Pipeline table (asset, indication, MoA, phase, next catalyst, source)
3. Recent clinical readouts with quoted primary/secondary endpoint results
4. Stated strategic priorities (quote CEO / R&D head)
5. Watch-outs (any inconsistencies across sources)
Cite the source filename and page for every row.

Step 3 — Fact-check pass

Paste in a paragraph your team already wrote:

Fact-check the following against the attached sources. For each claim, mark:
- Supported (with source + quote)
- Partially supported (explain gap)
- Unsupported
- Contradicted (with the contradicting source)
Do not add new claims.

This is where LLMs earn their keep in CI: catching the "we heard at a conference…" claims that never had a real source.

Step 4 — Delta tracking

Every quarter, re-run with the new documents and prompt:

Compare the current pipeline table to the attached prior brief. 
List additions, removals, phase changes, and any silently dropped assets.

Guardrails

• Public sources only. Do not upload material non-public information.
• Never let Claude infer a mechanism or endpoint that is not stated. Force "not disclosed" when appropriate.
• Timestamp every brief — pipeline data goes stale within weeks.

Pitfalls

• Analogy creep. Claude may equate two assets with different MoAs. Require verbatim MoA text from the source.
• PR spin. Instruct Claude to distinguish "company-stated" from "independently verifiable".
• Silent duplication. Some trials appear under multiple NCT IDs — deduplicate manually.

If something goes wrong

• A claim has no source. Delete it. Anything you cannot trace to a named public document does not go in the brief.
• The link is dead or points somewhere unrelated. Open every link before circulating; invented or stale URLs are common.
• Numbers disagree between sources. Say so in the brief and name both sources rather than picking one silently.
• It reads as fact what a company said about itself. Label company statements as company statements.