Anthropic Confirms Operating Bay Area Wet Biology Lab — SkimNews
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- Anthropic confirmed to TechCrunch it operates a wet biology lab in the Bay Area using AI models to run physical experiments, with head of life sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams telling Reuters: "to do biology, the final test is still, and will be for a while, in real lab work"
- Anthropic said the lab focuses on fundamental biology rather than drug discovery to avoid competing with its pharma customers, including Novo Nordisk, with whom it just announced a joint drug discovery deal
- Anthropic acquired stealth AI biotech Coefficient Bio in April and launched a Life Sciences Verification Program this week giving vetted bio researchers access to its most powerful models
- Anthropic faces internal safety backlash: resigned researcher Jacob Coxon warned "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," and the company's own alignment lead put the odds of AI exterminating humanity within a decade at greater than 10%
- Dario Amodei published a post last weekend calling on the AI industry to slow down and institute self-regulation, days after saying "I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years"
- Chamath Palihapitiya posted on X: "The group behind such hits as: 'We're All Going To Die' and 'Regulate Me Now' are building a wet lab in SF. I do not recommend this"
Why it matters: Anthropic is threading a deliberate needle: it wants the biology upside of a wet lab while staying in pharma's good graces, so it publicly scoped the work to fundamental biology even as it signed a drug discovery deal with Novo Nordisk. That posture becomes harder to maintain as internal voices put human extinction odds above 10% within a decade — a number Anthropic's own alignment lead confirmed.
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