Anthropic has established a biology research lab in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct physical experiments, according to Reuters. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, the company's Head of Life Sciences, has confirmed the lab's existence to the news organization. "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..."
Kauderer-Abrams didn't specify what exactly Anthropic is working on, but the company launched a drug discovery program called Claude Science back in June. Anthropic said that it was interested in doing research that pharma companies wouldn't touch because it likely wouldn't pay off financially. However, a spokesperson told Reuters that the lab wasn't created specifically, or perhaps only, for drug discovery.
While it's unclear what kind of work Anthropic is doing in the new lab, Kauderer-Abrams said he believes AI could fast-track the discovery of treatments for conditions previously thought to be too difficult to treat. It could, for instance, help speed up the development of complex and targeted therapies.
Sources told Reuters that one of the things Anthropic is looking at is to make Claude control robots to carry out scientific experiments. Kauderer-Abrams clarified, however, that 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 that Anthropic has yet to run any clinical trial.
As Reuters notes, though, Anthropic still has to deal with a trust problem from the public, like other AI companies today. 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 also called for a slowdown on advanced AI development to reduce the risk of losing control over frontier AI systems.
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