Anthropic decided to launch an internal drug discovery program. Not partner with a pharmaceutical company. Not license its technology to scientists who actually know what a protein does. Build its own lab.
This is the same company that makes Claude, a chatbot that writes poems about your feelings and helps you format spreadsheets. Now they're going to cure cancer. Makes perfect sense.
The press release says this is part of a push to sell AI tools to drugmakers. So they're selling shovels and also digging for gold. They're the casino and the gambler. They're hedging a bet nobody asked them to make.
Tech giants are betting on healthcare because software margins got boring. Google wants to predict your heart attack. Microsoft wants to optimize your surgery. Anthropic wants to discover drugs while simultaneously selling the drug discovery software to people who will compete with their drug discovery program.
Somewhere a venture capitalist is explaining to his LP that AI will compress a decade of clinical trials into six months. He has never heard of the FDA. He does not know what Phase 2 means. He thinks molecules are just really small code.
The beautiful part is that retail traders will absolutely buy this. They'll see Anthropic in a headline next to the word healthcare and assume it's the next Moderna. They'll start Googling whether they can buy pre-IPO shares on some sketchy secondary market. They'll ask their broker if there's an Anthropic ETF yet.
There isn't. But there will be. And it will charge a 1.2% expense ratio to hold shares of companies that mentioned AI in an earnings call.
Anthropic will spend three years and $400 million to discover that drug development is hard, pivot back to enterprise software, and call the whole thing a learning experience. The CEO will say they're doubling down on their core competency. Analysts will call it strategic focus. You'll call your broker to ask why your account is down 68%.
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
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