Anthropic Quietly Built a Biology Lab to Push AI Into Drug Research

Anthropic has quietly established a laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct physical biology experiments as the artificial intelligence startup expands its ambitions in drug science, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The company has said it wants to use AI to help unlock treatments for rare diseases, and its biology research has moved beyond “in silico,” or computer-based, evaluations.

In a Reuters interview, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, confirmed the existence of the wet lab.

“We believe that to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work,” he said. “We absolutely are doing that today, and I would describe our approach as being typical of what you would see in most biotech companies, where there’s some amount of that that we’re doing in our own facilities and some amount of that that we’re working with external partners on.”

An Anthropic spokesperson later clarified that the company’s lab is not specifically for drug discovery and declined to elaborate.

The move marks a step toward Anthropic’s broader ambition to use AI to address diseases that may receive less attention from pharmaceutical companies because of their commercial prospects. Any drug-development effort would face substantial uncertainty, with most drug candidates failing to demonstrate safety and efficacy in clinical trials.

For Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the effort has a personal dimension. In a recent essay, he said a disease killed his father only a few years before a cure became available.

Kauderer-Abrams echoed that motivation.

“The mission of the company is to develop powerful AI in such a way that benefits the world,” Kauderer-Abrams said. “By far, we see the biggest opportunity for that in the life sciences, and that is motivating everything that we’re doing.”

Anthropic is also exploring the use of physical automation to allow its Claude AI models to direct robotic laboratory equipment, the two people said.

The company wants to expand the use of AI to execute scientific experiments with limited human intervention, one of the people said. Anthropic’s spokesperson said human oversight and involvement remain essential for safety.

“We’re in the very early innings of using AI to automate the execution of lab work,” said Kauderer-Abrams, “an area that has the potential to bring about meaningful acceleration in so many different processes.”

The push comes as Anthropic faces heightened scrutiny over the potential risks of increasingly capable AI systems.

In recent weeks, some of its researchers have warned that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. Anthropic has also said it identified examples in which its systems could potentially have been used in biological weapons development.

Amodei has called for a slowdown in AI development, warning that future AI systems could cause catastrophic damage. At the same time, Anthropic is preparing for a potential initial public offering that could value the company at as much as $2 trillion, according to media reports, potentially providing additional capital for AI development.

“In our life-science work, we’re always balancing these things,” Kauderer-Abrams said, “making models better in ways that we think will uplift and accelerate developing medicines, and being thoughtful and careful about how we deploy it to limit the risk.”

Anthropic signaled in June that it intended to begin running drug programs. At an event in San Francisco, Kauderer-Abrams said the company would pursue preclinical work in areas that traditional drugmakers did not find financially attractive.

The company has also launched software called Claude Science, added Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board and acquired startup Coefficient Bio for about $400 million in stock, according to media reports. Anthropic confirmed the acquisition, which it said would help it build tools for drug development, but declined to comment on the reported price.

Anthropic is now expanding its in-house laboratory capabilities to move faster and gain firsthand experience in biology, while continuing to outsource work when that is more efficient, Kauderer-Abrams said.

“There’s some things that we can do much faster in our own hands,” he said, with the goal “to operate at the largest possible scale.”

The company has sought to hire a leader to expand procurement and other operations, according to a recent LinkedIn job posting. Another Anthropic role advertised through Jobera sought an expert in “protein and nucleic acid characterization,” among other biochemical work.

A separate Anthropic job listing said: “Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude.”

Life sciences already accounts for one of Anthropic’s largest areas of investment by headcount and resources, Kauderer-Abrams said.

He said AI could help accelerate the development of treatments for conditions previously considered “undruggable,” or too difficult to treat. One potential application is the discovery of bispecific and trispecific antibodies, complex molecules that can target multiple points on a protein or cell or act against several targets.

Anthropic has not disclosed which diseases it is targeting or provided details of its progress.

Drug development can take years after a molecule is identified, including through human clinical trials. Anthropic has not entered that stage.

Alphabet’s drug-discovery unit Isomorphic Labs has spent years working toward clinical development and previously pushed back its target for entering the clinic to the end of 2026.

Anthropic has also been developing technology to automate laboratory equipment. In August, it launched the Model Hardware Standard, designed to help AI systems operate scientific equipment.

The company is providing the standard and other AI services and tools to pharmaceutical companies including Roche’s Genentech, Bristol Myers Squibb and Novo Nordisk.

That creates a potential trust issue for Anthropic, according to the two people familiar with its efforts. Pharmaceutical customers could be concerned that Anthropic might gain insights into competing drug-development programs, even though the company separates customer data.

Kauderer-Abrams said Anthropic has drawn a boundary around clinical development partly because of competition concerns and is focusing on areas that the pharmaceutical industry would not otherwise address.

“We’re not competing with pharma and biotech companies that make their business in bringing drugs to market,” he said.

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