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Anthropic establishes Bay Area biology lab for physical experiments

Anthropic has set up a biology research lab in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct physical experiments, its head of life sciences confirmed to Reuters. The company has not disclosed specifics, but sources say it is exploring using Claude to control robots for lab work.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-18 22:50

Kauderer-Abrams said Anthropic believes real lab work remains the final test for biology. "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." He added that while Anthropic is doing lab work in-house, it also works with external partners when it makes sense.

He did not specify what exactly Anthropic is working on. The company launched a drug discovery program called Claude Science in June, saying it was interested in doing research that pharmaceutical companies would not touch because it likely would not pay off financially. A spokesperson told Reuters that the lab was not created specifically, or perhaps only, for drug discovery.

Sources told Reuters that one area Anthropic is examining is making Claude control robots to carry out scientific experiments. Kauderer-Abrams said the company is "in the very early innings of using AI to automate the execution of lab work" and that human oversight remains essential for safety, at least for now. He also said Anthropic has yet to run any clinical trial.

Kauderer-Abrams said he believes AI could speed the discovery of treatments for conditions previously thought too difficult to treat. It could, for instance, help accelerate the development of complex and targeted therapies.

Anthropic still faces a public trust problem, as other AI companies do. It recently revealed that it flagged and stopped multiple scientists who were using its AI models to create potential biological weapons. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also called for a slowdown on advanced AI development to reduce the risk of losing control over frontier AI systems.