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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted Wednesday that AI could help cure most diseases within the next five to 10 years, making the case that advanced technology will change how scientists study biology and medicine.
The company announced a Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that it believes could represent a new gene-editing mechanism, though Anthropic said its precise biological function remains unclear.
“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,” Amodei wrote on X.
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“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.”
He said the company has repeatedly seen a pattern in which AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to “superhuman” in just a few years.
“In 2023, models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024, they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025, they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026, they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend,” he said.
Amodei noted that the main difference between biology and mathematics is that math can be done purely theoretically and biology needs experimentation. He said while some point to this to argue that AI’s utility in biology will be limited, his company believes that suspicion is wrong.
He said humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if needed, work with the AI to repeat what they find.
“Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today,” he explained.
Accelerating fundamental biology discoveries could expand and speed the broader biomedical pipeline by identifying new drug targets, therapies and research tools, he said. While it would not shorten clinical trials, he said it could produce more promising candidates for testing, emphasizing that any resulting treatments would still require standard testing and regulatory review.
“In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to ‘cure most diseases in 5-10 years’ — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries,” Amodei wrote.
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“I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems,” he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, Amodei spoke before the U.N. Security Council about the need for the AI industry to establish international standards and cooperation to manage the threats posed by rapid AI developments and capabilities.
