Anthropic

AI · Biotech · Life Sciences

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Anthropic says Claude AI discovered a novel CRISPR-like enzyme system

Nearly 1,000 AI agents combed 200,000 DNA sequences and flagged the anomaly a human team had missed for years.

• Anthropic announced that its Claude model autonomously discovered a previously unknown enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA, with properties reminiscent of CRISPR, marking the first result from its new biology lab.
• Anthropic, best known for its Claude chatbot, launched a molecular biology research group and wet lab this spring to test whether AI can systematize scientific discovery.
• The system, named array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), pairs a known RNA-to-DNA copying enzyme with a mystery partner protein and a long array of repeating DNA sequences resembling a CRISPR array.
• Around 950 Claude agents ran for 21 hours, burning 210 million tokens to scan roughly 200,000 enzyme candidates and narrow them to 20 for deep review before one flagged the anomaly.
• Unlike CRISPR, ART lacks the cas genes that typically accompany such arrays, and Anthropic has not yet shown the enzyme is active or confirmed the system can be programmed to target specific DNA.
• CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang called the repeated DNA pattern "genuinely intriguing" and worth further study, while Stanford's Stanley Qi praised Claude's ability to spot and pursue the unusual pattern comprehensively.
• The findings appear only in an unreviewed preprint, and CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged the discovery builds on prior related work, including a similar system previously found by a Stanford team.
• The announcement is a high-profile bid to prove frontier AI can accelerate basic science even as its own leadership warns that increasingly capable models raise catastrophic risks, including bioterrorism.