Anthropic plans to expand its growing presence in life sciences by investing further in knowledge, talent, partnerships, and additional acquisitions, the artificial intelligence (AI) giant disclosed in its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO) filing.
Anthropic’s Form S-1 Registration Statement, filed Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, did not reveal key details such as what research areas it is pursuing through the molecular biology lab it disclosed last month, and what if any new therapies it is seeking to discover and develop. Nor did it quantify Anthropic’s total spending on life science activity.
The IPO filing also did not say how much money Anthropic seeks to raise on Wall Street—how many shares at what price—though news reports have had the company pursuing an eye-popping valuation of $2 trillion, 13% above the $1.77 trillion valuation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX when it went public in June. Anthropic plans to begin trading public shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol ANT.
However, the filing said that Anthropic is creating AI agents based on its Claude family of large language models that focus beyond accelerating drug discovery and development, toward handling many of the physical tasks associated with creating new therapies.
“Claude is used in drug discovery and development by our customers, our biotechnology partners, and our own researchers. We are building AI agents that support scientists at each stage of that process,” Anthropic stated.
“Beyond knowledge work, we believe frontier AI has the power to transform physical work. Advances in Claude’s general capabilities, together with our Model Hardware Standard, now allow it to operate lab and manufacturing equipment such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and off-the-shelf robotic arms.”
In August, Anthropic publicly previewed its Model Hardware Standard (MHS), which began as a collaboration between Anthropic and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus. Anthropic described HMS as “a shared specification for AI agents to safely operate physical devices, to a first group of scientific research labs and advanced manufacturers.”
“Currently in research preview, our Model Hardware Standard enables AI agents to find, understand, and safely operate lab and manufacturing equipment such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and off-the-shelf robotic arms,” Anthropic explained in its IPO filing. “Our Model Hardware Standard is model-agnostic and lets any agent harness reach devices with a programmable interface through standard protocols such as MCP.”
AI workbench
And in June, Anthropic released Claude Science, an AI workbench for scientists that consolidates fragmented research tools, including more than 60 scientific databases and connectors pre-configured for genomics, proteomics, structural biology, and more, into a single reasoning layer. One Anthropic partner, Basecamp Research, has made available through Claude Science its antibiotic design and vaccine target prediction EDEN models for global public health research.
In the IPO filing, Anthropic also summarized many—though not all—of its recent life-sci activities: “To build the best tools for the industry, we have invested in deep life sciences expertise of our own, hiring industry experts, building a molecular biology lab, acquiring Coefficient Bio, and partnering with industry leaders.”
Those efforts have paid off, the company said: As of September 30, 2026, Anthropic included among its customers “nine of the 10 largest” pharmaceutical companies, without disclosing their names. Those 10 are among the over 50% of the Fortune 500 that Anthropic counts among its customers with $100,000 or more of revenue on a TTM [trailing 12 months] basis. Anthropic added that every company in the Fortune 10, and more than 30% of the Forbes Global 2000 were also among its customers with $100,000+ revenue TTM.
Anthropic is carrying out life sciences research through a molecular biology lab and a research group formed earlier this year “to see whether general AI models can systematize and accelerate discoveries capable of revolutionizing biology and medicine,” the company stated last month. “Our focus is on fundamental biology research using Claude: exploring datasets of DNA to identify uncharacterized protein families, generating hypotheses at scale, and testing them through experiments in the lab.”
The IPO filing offered no details about how many researchers are based at the lab, and how much R&D spend the lab accounts for of Anthropic’s total research and development expense. That expense jumped more than quintupled during the first six months of this year, to $9.741 billion from $1.85 billion in January-June 2025. For all of last year, Anthropic spent a total $6.338 billion on R&D, according to the Form S-1.
The research lab generated worldwide headlines last month when Anthropic announced that its Claude large-language model “discovered a novel enzyme system with properties reminiscent of CRISPR, with only high-level direction from our scientists.”
Elaborating further in a post on X, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the novel enzyme system as “a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student.”
‘Something interesting’
“The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out,” Amodei added.
In April, tech news outlets The Information and the Substack-based Newcomber newsletter founded by Eric Newcomber first reported that Anthropic acquired the stealth AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio for about $400 million in stock. Anthropic confirmed the acquisition though not the price in its IPO, saying it bought the company “to accelerate our research in the life sciences.”
Founded last year, Coefficient has developed an AI platform for purposes that include planning drug research and development, managing clinical regulatory strategy, and identifying new drug opportunities, OncoDaily reported. Coefficient was established by co-founders that include Nathan Frey, PhD, and Samuel Stanton, PhD, both previously with Genentech’s Prescient Design computational drug discovery unit. Another co-founder, Aris Theologis, serves as CEO and was previously chief business officer at Evozyne and a vice president at Paragon Biosciences.
According to the IPO filing, Anthropic finished January-June 2026 with a staggering net loss of $80.748 billion, up more than six-fold from the $12.969 billion net loss the company reported for the first six months of 2025. However, revenue leaped 14-fold to $16.286 billion in the first half of this year, from $1.163 billion in January-June 2025.
And Anthropic’s operating loss, defined as operating expenses exceeding revenue from core business operations, actually shrunk during the first half of 2026 to $693 million from $2.135 billion a year earlier.
For all of 2025, Anthropic reported a net loss of $41.965 billion, up five-fold from the $8.309 billion net loss of 2024, itself more than five times the $1.531 billion net loss of 2023.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are co-leading the IPO, with participation by 20 other banks and other investment institutions.