Anthropic quietly builds biology lab as it deepens drug ambitions
Anthropic has quietly set up a laboratory for physical biology work, extending its artificial intelligence ambitions into drug science, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The "wet lab" in the San Francisco Bay Area marks a step beyond the "in silico" evaluations that have so far underpinned the start-up's biology efforts. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic's head of life sciences, confirmed its existence in an interview. "The final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work," he said, describing an approach typical of most biotech companies, with some work done in-house and some with outside partners. A spokesperson later said the facility was not intended specifically for drug discovery, but declined to elaborate.
The move is a small step towards a far larger goal: tackling diseases that Anthropic believes the pharmaceutical industry has neglected. One of the people said it also reflected a desire to show staff and the public that AI is worth the disruption to jobs and, potentially, human life. Success is far from assured, since most drugs fail clinical trials on safety or efficacy. For chief executive Dario Amodei the project is personal: he has written that a disease killed his father only a few years before a cure emerged.
Anthropic wants its Claude model to direct robotic units to run experiments with minimal human involvement, one of the people said, though the spokesperson stressed that human oversight remains essential for safety. "We're in the very early innings of using AI to automate the execution of lab work," Kauderer-Abrams said.
The push comes at a fraught moment. In the past two weeks, some Anthropic researchers have warned that AI could lead to human extinction, and the company said it had found instances where its systems could have been used toward developing biological weapons, a claim that met some skepticism. Amodei has also called for a slowdown in development, arguing that a future AI more capable than the OpenAI agents that hacked Hugging Face could cause catastrophic damage. Meanwhile, Anthropic is preparing an initial public offering that could value it at $2tn. "In our life-science work, we're always balancing these things," Kauderer-Abrams said.
Anthropic set out its plans to run drug programs at a San Francisco event in June, where Kauderer-Abrams said it would pursue preclinical work in areas traditional companies found financially unattractive. It has since launched software called Claude Science, appointed Novartis (NVS) chief executive Vas Narasimhan to its board, and bought the start-up Coefficient Bio for about $400mn in stock, according to media reports. Anthropic confirmed the acquisition but not the price.
The company is now expanding its in-house capacity. "There are some things that we can do much faster in our own hands," Kauderer-Abrams said, with the aim "to operate at the largest possible scale." Job postings seek a leader for procurement and operations and an expert in protein and nucleic acid characterization, and one states the goal of accelerating life sciences progress "by an order of magnitude." Life sciences is already among Anthropic's largest investment areas by headcount and resources, he added.
Kauderer-Abrams believes AI could speed progress on conditions long considered "undruggable", including through bispecific and trispecific antibodies, complex molecules that can bind several points on a protein or cell. Which diseases Anthropic is targeting, and how far it has got, remain unclear. Bringing a molecule to market can take years of human trials, a hurdle Anthropic has not taken on. Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery arm of rival Alphabet (GOOGL), has spent years working towards the clinic and earlier pushed back that goal to the end of 2026.
Anthropic launched the Model Hardware Standard in August to help AI operate lab equipment, and supplies it and wider AI tools to leading drugmakers including Roche's (RHHBY) Genentech, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY) and Novo Nordisk (NVO).
Those relationships pose a trust problem, the two people said: customers may worry that Anthropic will learn from their competing drug programs, even though it walls off their data. Partly for that reason, Kauderer-Abrams said, Anthropic has drawn a line at running clinical trials for now and is focusing on needs industry would not address. "We're not competing with pharma and biotech companies that make their business in bringing drugs to market," he said.