When can we say AI made a scientific discovery?

AI companies’ insistence that their technology is making breakthroughs, not just aiding scientists, is making real progress harder to recognize.

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Last Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scientists run experiments on what they report. And this AI-powered lab, the company said, had made its first discovery.