Will Manidis

Claude Science looks to me like a bid to own the economic version control system for life sciences. The logical endgame is Anthropic financing hundreds of drug programs in parallel for the biopharmas that leverage its harness. In return, Anthropic will ask for clinical data rights and use the data generated to 1) improve their ability to finance the next program and 2) eventually feed a God Model that allows them to create the holy grail: an “AI drug factory”. You can think of a drug program as an exercise in making a sequence of complex decisions under uncertainty: specifically, decisions around how to allocate incremental experimental capital to maximize expected value across safety, efficacy, commercialization, etc. A growing share of that experimental capital will be compute-mediated over time (e.g, Claude generated roughly 35,000 antibody designs in a month for Divergence Labs). But the most consequential increments will still go toward compiling therapeutic candidates in (very scarce and slow) human biological computers, which is where both the cost per bit and the consequentiality per bit of information are highest. Whoever owns the system that originates and integrates the most information upstream and downstream of those allocation decisions (in this case Anthropic) becomes the best suited to start making them (or at least gains a differentiated understanding of the relevant signals necessary to make those decisions well). Some examples of the experimental capital allocation decisions they are starting to help generate / facilitate and version: 1) Most importantly: Acquiring Mithril, where Cody Tranbarger (@prof_oak_) is massively levered by a swarm of agents that help him identify, evaluate, and ultimately select a much larger # of drug programs to run in parallel than is typically possible for a single drug hunter. He calls this a “Pipeline-in-a-Person” 2) Bristol Myers using Claude Science to analyze their proprietary data (guessing preclinical and clinical) to create optimal clinical study plans and weigh the study’s chance of success. If that program is actually executed, they should be able to calibrate how well those predictions turned out and in what sense they were right or wrong. 3) The Column Group spinning up Pleiades: a biopharma company with a mandate to “run many more—and more complex—drug programs than is usual for a small team.” Similar to the Formation Bio’s of the world. They are using Claude to evaluate target-disease pairs and find non-obvious, potentially valuable combinations. I believe Anthropic is running their own drug programs not to compete with pharma directly (yet), but instead to generate the learning signals that would allow them to become the single largest (and potentially best calibrated) underwriter / financier of drug programs. These financed programs would eventually create the data distributions necessary for them to create an AI drug factory (and start competing with pharma). Specifically, I could see Anthropic creating the first real instantiation of @AndrewWLo’s elegant Megafund model. TLDR on Megafund (proposed in Nature Biotechnology 14 years ago): any single drug program is a terrible bet on its own, but if one entity funds a large enough portfolio of them, the odds that a few hit become predictable enough to finance the whole thing with debt. Lo et al. proposed doing this by issuing “research-backed obligations” (bonds collateralized by the portfolio and its IP) alongside an equity tranche. Ofc, the pool of available capital that buys debt is far larger than the pool that buys biotech equity, therefore this would unlock capital from pensions, insurers, endowments, etc. Their simulations of $5–15 billion oncology portfolios estimated average annual returns of 8.9–11.4% for the equity and IMPORTANTLY 5–8% for the RBOs. This would be a fixed-income-like return that many new sources of capital would get excited about. For some reason this strategy never took off, and part of the reason is that it’s pretty hard to find a large basket of drug programs that’s sufficiently uncorrelated. But I also think it’s because there wasn’t really an incentive for any well capitalized player to push through all the schleps and actually unlock the capital sources to this end. I think Anthropic has that incentive. They have a structurally higher willingness to finance a drug program / make this structure real, because, by doing so, they would capture two return streams: 1) the potential economics of a blockbuster drug and 2) the widely amortizable value of what the associated series of experimental capital allocation decisions teach its models! In return for providing biopharmas cheap financing, Anthropic will ask for clinical data rights (including rights to learn from decision histories, negative results, protocols, etc.). Just selling tokens / the harness doesn’t give them the right to learn all of these things, but providing financing likely would. This would allow them to make more well-calibrated experimental capital allocation decisions over time and eventually feed the God Model that “cures all disease.” This would all also be quite charismatic: your retirement money funds the experiments that might let you enjoy a much longer retirement!

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