GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.'s humanitarian aid coordination office is downsizing its appeal for annual funding in 2026 after support this year, mostly from Westerngovernments, plunged to the lowest level in a decade.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Monday it was seeking $33 billion to help some 135 million people cope with fallout from wars, climate disasters, earthquakes, epidemics and food shortages. This year, it took in $15 billion, the lowest level in a decade.
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FILE - A convoy of vehicles loaded with food and other aid is en route to Sweida on the international highway in rural Daraa province, Syria, July 20, 2025, heading to the city of Busra al-Sham. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki, File)
FILE - Palestinians grab sacks of flour from a moving truck carrying World Food Programme aid as it drives through Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, Nov. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana, File)
FILE - People carry sacks and boxes of food and humanitarian aid that was unloaded from a World Food Program convoy that had been heading to Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, June 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)
FILE - Women displaced from El-Fasher stand in line to receive food aid at the newly established El-Afadh camp in Al Dabbah, in Sudan's Northern State, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali, File)
The office says next year it wants more than $4.1 billion to reach 3 million people in Palestinian areas, another $2.9 billion for Sudan — home to the world's largest displacement crisis — and $2.8 billion for a regional plan around Syria.
“In 2025, hunger surged. Food budgets were slashed — even as famines hit parts of Sudan and Gaza. Health systems broke apart,” said OCHA chief Tom Fletcher. “Disease outbreaks spiked. Millions went without essential food, health care and protection. Programs to protect women and girls were slashed, hundreds of aid organizations shut.”
The U.N. aid coordinator sought $47 billion for this year and aimed to help 190 million people worldwide. Because of the lower support, it and humanitarian partners reached 25 million fewer people this year than in 2024.
The donor fatigue comes as many wealthy European countries face security threats from an increasingly assertive Russia on their eastern flank and have experienced lackluster economic growth in recent years, putting new strains on government budgets and the consumers who pay taxes to sustain them.
“I know budgets are tight right now. Families everywhere are under strain,” Fletcher said. “But the world spent $2.7 trillion on defense last year – on guns and arms. And I’m asking for just over 1% of that.”
The U.N. system this year has slashed thousands of jobs, notably at its migration and refugee agencies, and Secretary-General António Guterres' office has launched a review of U.N. operations — which may or may not produce firm results.
Fletcher, who answers to Guterres, has called for “radical transformation” of aid by reducing bureaucracy, boosting efficiency and giving more power to local groups. Fletcher cited “very practical, constructive conversations” almost daily with the Trump administration.
“Do I want to shame the world into responding? Absolutely,” Fletcher said. “But I also want to channel this sense of determination and anger that we have as humanitarians, that we will carry on delivering with what we get.”
FILE - A convoy of vehicles loaded with food and other aid is en route to Sweida on the international highway in rural Daraa province, Syria, July 20, 2025, heading to the city of Busra al-Sham. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki, File)
FILE - Palestinians grab sacks of flour from a moving truck carrying World Food Programme aid as it drives through Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, Nov. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana, File)
FILE - People carry sacks and boxes of food and humanitarian aid that was unloaded from a World Food Program convoy that had been heading to Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, June 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)
FILE - Women displaced from El-Fasher stand in line to receive food aid at the newly established El-Afadh camp in Al Dabbah, in Sudan's Northern State, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali, File)
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 12, 2026--
Owkin, an AI company on a mission to solve the complexity of biology, today announced that its interoperable Pathology Explorer AI agent will be included in the launch of Claude for Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) by Anthropic. This marks the first time a highly specialized, world-leading biological agent trained primarily on multimodal patient data is accessible through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to a broad audience of healthcare and life sciences professionals.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260112836381/en/
The collaboration enables seamless integration of Owkin's advanced pathology analysis capabilities into Claude's AI platform, making sophisticated biological intelligence accessible to healthcare organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions within their Claude workflows, without requiring system overhauls or proprietary process changes.
"I believe this agentic interoperability is the future of biopharma discoveries," said Thomas Clozel, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Owkin. "By making our best-in-class agents trained on patient data from the world's leading hospitals accessible through portals like Claude for HCLS, we're enabling the biggest healthcare organizations to accelerate their research in ways that weren't possible before. This is about putting patient data first when training AI and making that intelligence universally available to cure disease faster."
Pathology Explorer is part of Owkin’s K Pro community of agents for biology. This agent identifies and locates cell and tissue types, enabling spatially-aware analysis of patient tissue images. Using the agent, users can analyze tumors and their microenvironments and study inflammation patterns. Pathology Explorer enables the extraction of biomarkers from digitized pathology images to generate and validate hypotheses through cohort-level survival analysis — a critical capability for accelerating drug discovery, clinical trial design, and development of digital diagnostic tools. The agent leverages proprietary, best-in-class AI models that have been trained on patient histopathology data sourced from Owkin's network spanning over 800 hospitals from 104 healthcare centers, enabling it to deliver high-accuracy analysis.
Owkin MCP Integration Enables Seamless Access
Owkin has developed industry standard MCP encoding specifically designed to allow its proprietary K Pro agents to integrate seamlessly with Claude's interface. Pathology Explorer is the first agent from Owkin's interoperable agentic AI infrastructure for biology to be offered for external integration, demonstrating the company's commitment to building an open, API-first infrastructure that can serve as the universal foundation for advancing drug development.
Claude for Healthcare and Life Sciences is designed to accelerate preclinical R&D (including bioinformatics, protocol development, and literature synthesis), streamline clinical trial operations and data management, and support regulatory affairs and submission preparation. The integration of Owkin's Pathology Explorer extends these capabilities by enabling deep biological reasoning specifically trained on real patient data.
This is the third in a series of major announcements Owkin is unveiling, including agentic infrastructure for biology (Owkin's new interoperable agentic infrastructure for biopharma) and a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA to enhance OwkinZero, Owkin's biological large reasoning model.
About Owkin
Owkin is an AI company with $300 million in funding on a mission to solve the complexity of biology. It is building the first Biological Artificial Super Intelligence (BASI) by combining powerful biological large reasoning models, multimodal patient data, and agentic software. At the heart of this system is Owkin K, an AI copilot, and OwkinZero, Owkin's biological large reasoning model, used by researchers, clinicians, and drug developers to better understand biology, validate scientific hypotheses, and deliver better diagnostics and therapies faster. Owkin has exclusive access to multimodal patient data from more than 800 hospitals collected over a decade and partners with eight of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies. For more information, visit www.owkin.com.
Owkin Media Kit:https://www.owkin.com/press-kit
Owkin's Specialized Biological AI Agent Pathology Explorer Launches with Anthropic's Claude for Healthcare and Life Sciences.
