Anthropic Says Claude Discovered Novel Enzyme System With CRISPR-Like Features
Anthropic's new wet biology lab, powered by its AI model Claude, has reportedly discovered a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like properties. This finding highlights the increasing role of AI in scientific discovery, though ethical concerns regarding AI's capabilities and the human-led nature of current lab experiments remain central to the discussion.
AI company Anthropic says its newly established wet biology laboratory has produced an early scientific result in which its Claude AI identified a previously uncharacterised enzyme system with features reminiscent of CRISPR. The system, found in the DNA of bacteriophages, is built around a reverse transcriptase and an array of repeated DNA sequences that Anthropic says shares characteristics with systems capable of programmable DNA operations.
The company has named the system array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), although its primary biological function remains unknown and further experiments are needed to determine its significance.
Anthropic said Claude searched a large DNA database using roughly 950 agents over 21 hours, processing about 210 million tokens in the process. The agents identified more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, narrowed them to 3,500 candidate systems, and ultimately focused on 20 of the most compelling candidates for detailed analysis before one unusual system was flagged for human review.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeisaid the discovery was made “mostly, though not entirely, by Claude,” while acknowledging that related work had previously been conducted by other researchers, including a Stanford team.
The development comes as Anthropic expands its use of AI in biological research, while also highlighting the safety questions surrounding increasingly capable models. The physical experiments are currently conducted by human scientists, with Anthropic saying its Bay Area laboratory operates like a conventional molecular-biology lab and tests promising candidates after Claude generates and analyses hypotheses; the company says the work does not involve human-infecting pathogens.
Anthropic has also acknowledged the possibility of more autonomous biology research in the future, including Claude eventually controlling laboratory equipment with appropriate safeguards, but said that is not how the current laboratory operates.