Anthropic’s biolab made a discovery it’s comparing to Crispr

Anthropic says its AI Claude has “autonomously discovered” a new enzyme system similar to machinery behind the powerful gene-editing tool Crispr. It’s the first result from Anthropic’s newly-launched wet lab and an early test of Claude’s usefulness for science as the company prepares to go public.

The company says Claude found the enzyme system after searching through a massive database of DNA sequences, adding that its scientists’ involvement was limited to the initial prompt and lab work.

Over 21 hours, Anthropic said nearly 950 Claude agents worked through 210 million tokens before one spotted an unusual repeating pattern in the dataset and flagged for human review. Further analysis and lab testing revealed “a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages,” a type of virus that infects bacteria.