I work in biotech. Honestly, I think they will run into massive hurdles.

Amodei's academic background is relevant for protein engineering. Hence the recent press releases Anthropic has released which all concern prototype proof-of-concepts related to binding efficacy.

For a large number of therapeutic relevant indications, the bottleneck is actually clinical trials where you must contend with the sideeffects of any given therapeutic. Almost every drug I've worked on involves very well known mechanisms where knockdowns with targeted compounds will work in a petri dish, but can have catastrophic consequences when dosed on a live human.

As far as I can see there is no way to accelerate clinical trials in humans.

Even the most fantastically large and detailed perturbation datasets will struggle to capture this dynamic in a full human. This is why tech oligarchs are investing in virtual cell models. With a large automated research lab running perturbations 24/7 and capturing massive amounts of data, perhaps we will get as confident with predicting outcomes in cells as we now are confident with many coding projects. However, this is a scientific question, not a technological one. Public companies rarely give the people running them leeway to try and fail on big scientific question marks as opposed to well established or soon-to-be well established technology.