San Francisco, September 25 (AI Briefing) -- Anthropic announced that its Claude model autonomously identified a novel enzyme system with structural properties reminiscent of CRISPR, after spending roughly 21 hours scanning large databases of bacterial DNA sequences. The finding, from the company's new San Francisco biology research lab, is Anthropic's first major wet-lab biology success.
A cluster of 950 Claude instances ran in parallel for 21 hours, consuming about 210 million tokens and scanning more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases before discovering the new system in giant phage DNA. The system, named array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, was previously unrecorded by human researchers.
Claude recognised repeating DNA sequences plus an additional protein of unknown function that prior human studies had missed, though its precise function and biotechnological utility remain unclear. Researchers described the structural similarity to CRISPR as striking and said the result demonstrates how AI agents can surface patterns across datasets far larger than any human team could review manually.
Anthropic said the work is part of a broader effort to apply frontier models to scientific discovery.
