Anthropic has quietly set up a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct physical biology work as it pushes its artificial-intelligence ambitions into drug science, according to two people familiar with the matter. In a Reuters interview on Tuesday, Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, confirmed the wet lab, saying "to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work." A spokesperson later clarified that the lab is not for drug discovery specifically, declining to elaborate. The move represents a small step toward Anthropic's ambition to tackle diseases it thinks the pharmaceutical industry is neglecting. CEO Dario Amodei said a disease killed his father only a few years before a cure came about. Anthropic is embracing physical automation and wants to push how its Claude AI can direct robotic units to carry out science experiments with limited human intervention, though a spokesperson said human oversight and involvement are essential for safety. Kauderer-Abrams said, "We're in the very early innings of using AI to automate the execution of lab work."