Why Anthropic Is Opening a Wet Lab: Claude as the Intelligence Layer of R&D

Anthropic has set up a biology wet lab in the Bay Area, Reuters reported on Friday. Two days earlier, Novo Nordisk signed up to test Claude Science in its R&D workflows.

Back in July, I wrote that Anthropic's own discovery programmes could help it improve Claude. The lab fits that idea, even though Anthropic says it isn't specifically a drug discovery lab. Its focus, according to the company, is fundamental biology. The roles it is hiring for include medicinal chemists, computational biologists and experimental biologists.

Anthropic can do plenty of this through partners and CROs. Its recent protein binder campaign, for example, used Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience to produce and test Claude's designs. But keeping some experiments in-house gives Anthropic a much tighter lab-in-the-loop between the model, the experiment and what happens next.

Commercially, I think the direction is becoming clearer. Build Claude into the intelligence layer for scientific R&D, learn from doing some of the science yourself, and sell that capability to pharma, biotech and research organisations. Novo is now testing it, BMS is deploying Claude across R&D, and Genentech is already experimenting with Claude in the physical lab.

I still don't think Anthropic will compete directly with pharma in bringing drugs to market, at least for now.