Anthropic Secretly Set Up a Biology Lab to Test AI Experiments

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has secretly built its own biology lab to run real-world scientific experiments. News of the facility's existence broke via Reuters, which cited two people familiar with the matter. Only after the report went public did Anthropic confirm that the lab actually exists.

Eric Kauderer-Abrams, who heads the company's natural sciences division, told the agency that Anthropic does indeed conduct biological experiments in-house, while outsourcing part of the work to external partners. "When you want to do biology, the ultimate test remains actual lab work, and that will be true for a long time," he said.

What the Company Isn't Saying

Anthropic has yet to reveal exactly what the lab is working on. A company representative would only say that the facility is not specifically dedicated to drug discovery.

That said, the company has been openly discussing its pharmaceutical research ambitions for months. In June, according to Engadget, Anthropic launched a program called Claude Science, saying it intended to pursue areas that traditional pharmaceutical companies avoid because they aren't commercially attractive enough.

According to Reuters' sources, Anthropic is exploring whether Claude could operate robotic equipment to carry out scientific experiments with minimal human involvement.

AI Taking Over the Grunt Work of Science

Kauderer-Abrams stressed that the company is only at the beginning of this journey, and human oversight remains essential for safety reasons. "We're at the very early stages of using AI to automate lab work," he noted.

If the approach pans out, it could eventually create a loop in which the AI proposes an experiment, a robotic device carries it out, and the model then helps analyze the results and suggest next steps. Scientists wouldn't be cut out of the process entirely — only the repetitive parts of the work would be automated.

Speed is one of the main reasons Anthropic is moving into this space. Kauderer-Abrams believes AI can speed up the development of treatments for diseases long considered too complex to tackle, such as the creation of bispecific and trispecific antibodies.

For now, Anthropic has no plans to compete with traditional pharmaceutical companies at the final stage of drug development — it doesn't run clinical trials and says it's focused on areas the commercial pharma industry largely neglects. Even so, the road from discovering a promising molecule to getting an actual drug to patients still takes many years.

Bird Flu and Dangerous Experiments

The lab's emergence comes at a rather awkward moment: just days before news of its own biolab broke, Anthropic reported cases of users trying to exploit Claude to carry out dangerous biological research.

Source: novinky.cz