Anthropic has built a wet laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct physical biology experiments, moving its life-sciences program beyond purely computational work1,2.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic's head of life sciences, confirmed the lab's existence in a Reuters interview. "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 lab is not for drug discovery specifically, declining to elaborate further.
Building the life-sciences stack
The wet lab is one element of a broader push. Anthropic staked out its intention to run drug programs at a San Francisco event in June, where Kauderer-Abrams said the company would pursue preclinical work in areas that traditional companies did not find financially attractive. Anthropic has said it wants to unlock treatments for rare diseases.
On the software side, Anthropic launched a product called Claude Science. In August, the company launched the Model Hardware Standard, a framework that helps AI operate laboratory equipment. Anthropic provides the Model Hardware Standard and broader AI services and tools to Roche's Genentech, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Novo Nordisk.
Acquisitions and hiring
Anthropic bought the startup Coefficient Bio for about $400 million in stock, a deal the company confirmed. It has also added Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board.
On the talent front, Anthropic has looked to hire a leader to ramp up procurement and other operations, and posted a role seeking an expert on protein and nucleic acid characterization.
Anthropic's stated goal is to accelerate progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude. The company is not running clinical trials for now, focusing instead on needs that industry would not otherwise address.
ANALYSIS The combination of a physical lab, hardware-integration standards, pharma partnerships, and a $400 million acquisition marks a level of commitment to biology that goes well beyond the API-licensing arrangements other AI companies have pursued with drug developers. Anthropic is building internal experimental capacity rather than relying solely on partners to validate its models' outputs.