Anthropic has quietly built a biology lab, Reuters reports

Anthropic has set up a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place to run physical biology experiments rather than simulate them.

The company confirms it exists, yet it will not say what it is for, beyond ruling out the obvious answer, which is drug discovery.

The news was reported by Reuters today, by Jeffrey Dastin and Michael Erman, and confirmed to them by Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences.

A spokesperson told the agency it is “not for drug discovery specifically”, then declined to elaborate.

“We believe that to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work,” Kauderer-Abrams told Reuters.

On whether machines might run the bench itself, he said the company is “in the very early innings”.

Life sciences is now among Anthropic’s largest areas by headcount and spending, and it has been recruiting a procurement lead and a biochemical specialist.

These developments are not happening in isolation as they follow a year of acquisitions in the biotech space.

In April, Anthropic bought Coefficient Bio, a startup with fewer than ten employees, for about $400 million in stock. That same month, its Long-Term Benefit Trust added Novartis’s chief executive, Vas Narasimhan, to the board.

In June, Anthropic launched Claude Science, a software tool designed for laboratory research instead of chat applications.

And Novo Nordisk agreed to test it just two days before the lab was announced. Genentech and Bristol Myers Squibb are already customers.

The lab’s features were kept almost entirely secret: Anthropic provided no information about its size, number of staff, opening date, or biosafety level, the latter of which would most indicate the kind of work the room is capable of handling.

Furthermore, the company informed Reuters that it still sends part of its biological work to external partners, meaning the lab is an addition to that arrangement, not a replacement.

Reuters has linked part of the campaign to Dario Amodei personally since the disease killed his father before a cure was found.

What makes this situation uneasy is that Anthropic is the same company that regularly shares what its own models can do in this area.

It has identified situations in which its systems might have been used to help develop biological weapons, and it has also relaxed the biological safeguards on Claude Fable 5.

When asked about how they manage this balance, Kauderer-Abrams simply said, “we’re always balancing these things,” and added that deployment is managed carefully to reduce risk.

A room where real experiments take place is the natural outcome of the idea that simulation alone is not sufficient. This room also represents the most serious risk Anthropic has been warning about for two years.

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