Anthropic has confirmed it opened a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, while declining to specify whether it will be used for drug discovery. In comments reported by Reuters and attributed to Anthropic’s head of life sciences, the company said the lab is for real biology and “not for drug discovery specifically.” Anthropic is positioning the facility as an experiment-ready environment rather than a purely computational workflow. The company also has been scaling its life sciences footprint via acquisitions and tools designed for lab research, including the purchase of Coefficient Bio in April for about $400 million in stock. The lab’s purpose remains intentionally limited in public detail, including biosafety level, size, and staffing. That secrecy contrasts with the company’s public demonstrations of what its AI systems can do in biological contexts. For biotech executives, the move signals increasing competition from AI infrastructure providers that want closer coupling between models and wet-lab execution, potentially accelerating iteration cycles for biology programs that can access the facility.