Anthropic has a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it can use its AI models to run physical experiments, it confirmed to TechCrunch. The company bought the stealth AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio in April, though it declined to give specifics on what the lab is working on, saying the main focus is fundamental biology, not drug discovery.
"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, with Anthropic conducting some research while working with external partners.
Anthropic has taken steps to avoid the appearance of competing with the pharmaceutical industry, where it counts major customers and partners—it recently announced a deal with Novo Nordisk on joint drug discovery. The company has already faced backlash for launching products perceived to compete with its customers.
This week, Anthropic also launched a Life Sciences Verification Program to give vetted biology researchers access to its most powerful models. It has published reports on accelerating protein design and bimolecular modeling.
The existence of the lab sits in stark contrast with the company's own dire warnings about AI risk. Researcher Jacob Coxon recently resigned from Anthropic, warning that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic's alignment lead has given the odds at greater than 10% that AI could exterminate humanity within the next decade. CEO Dario 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.
The juxtaposition of these warnings and the wet lab has not gone unnoticed in the tech industry.