Anthropic confirms it runs a wet biology lab for its AI models

Anthropic has a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it can use its AI models to run physical experiments, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. AI leaders have promised that AI is key to curing human disease — CEO Dario Amodei said just last week that “I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5-10 years” — and testing those theories in real life requires a way to run physical experiments. “We believe that to do biology, the final test is still, and will be for a while, in real lab work,” Anthropic’s head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, told Reuters. “We absolutely are doing that today.” He added that the lab operates like most biotech labs: Anthropic conducts some research there while also working with external partners. The news follows Anthropic’s acquisition of Coefficient Bio, a stealth AI biotech, in April.

Anthropic declined to give specifics on what the wet lab is working on, but said its main focus is fundamental biology, not drug discovery — the company says it doesn’t want to appear to compete with the pharmaceutical industry, where it has numerous major customers and partners, including a recently announced deal to work with Novo Nordisk on joint drug discovery. Anthropic has already faced backlash for launching products perceived to compete with those of its customers. This week, Anthropic also launched a Life Sciences Verification Program to give vetted bio researchers access to its most powerful models, and has published research reports on work supporting drug discovery, including one on accelerating protein design.

The lab news comes as the industry continues reeling from the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warned that people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”; Anthropic’s own alignment lead has put the odds at greater than 10% that AI could exterminate humanity within the next decade. Amodei published a post last weekend calling on the industry to slow down and institute self-regulation, and has repeatedly called bioterrorism one of AI’s biggest risks.

Why it matters

Anthropic building physical lab capacity to test its own AI-generated biology theories shows the company moving from AI-as-research-assistant toward AI-as-experimenter, even as its own leadership warns publicly about AI’s bioterrorism risks.