Anthropic establishes biology lab for Claude’s drug R&D experiments

Anthropic isn’t just building AI models that talk about science anymore. The company has set up physical biology labs and hired bench scientists to let Claude conduct real-world experiments in drug research, a move that blurs the line between AI company and pharmaceutical operation. The initiative sits under Claude Science, an AI workbench Anthropic launched on June 30, 2026, that integrates over 60 scientific databases and deploys specialized agents for tasks across genomics, proteomics, and computational biology. The platform runs on existing Claude models, including Opus 4.8, and is already being used by pharmaceutical heavyweights like Novo Nordisk and AstraZeneca. From silicon to petri dishes What makes this unusual isn’t the computational side. The twist is that Anthropic is pursuing its own internal drug discoveries, specifically targeting rare and neglected diseases, the kind that traditional pharma often ignores because the economics don’t pencil out. To do this, the company has brought biologists onto its team and built out wet lab spaces where physical experiments can validate what Claude’s models predict. It’s a feedback loop: the AI generates hypotheses and designs mol...