An AI lab just became a drug company. The patients are still offstage.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, published what reads like a progress report this week. It is really a career change. Anthropic bought Mithril Medicine, a one-person biotech working on two rare forms of muscular dystrophy, whose founder used Claude to organize work with 11 outside labs. It expects a drug ready for human trials as soon as late 2028. An AI lab is now a drug company.

Six partner companies shared early results. One generated about 35,000 antibody designs in a month. Another had Claude draft a regulatory document in four hours, work that took about three months by hand. These are the companies’ own numbers, and they are early.

Bristol Myers Squibb uses Claude to judge early trial plans and estimate their odds of success. In July, BMS and a group of patient advocates published a paper saying “engagement is most effective before key research decisions are finalized.” A trial plan is one of those decisions. The announcement mentions patients once, as people riskier bets might someday help.

My bet is that the next winner here won’t be the company that designs the fastest molecule, it will be the one that gets patients into that trial-plan score.