Anthropic Says Claude Autonomously Found a Novel Enzyme System, Drawing Crispr Comparison

According to The Verge, the company said Claude found the enzyme system after searching a massive database of DNA sequences, and that its own scientists' involvement was limited to the initial prompt and laboratory work.

Over 21 hours, nearly 950 Claude agents worked through 210 million tokens before one spotted an unusual repeating pattern in the dataset and flagged it for human review, Anthropic said. The company separately described the effort as involving close to 1,000 agents. Further analysis and lab testing revealed what Anthropic called a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages, the type of virus that infects bacteria.

Anthropic said it is still working to understand what the enzyme system does. It said it felt it was important to share such findings early, both to demonstrate Claude's capabilities and to give the broader community insight into what the company is working on.

Despite the comparison to Crispr, it remains unclear whether the discovery will have any practical applications, let alone be as transformative as the gene-editing technology. The Verge described the announcement as premature. It comes as Anthropic seeks to attract more scientists to its lab and to expand into areas such as drug discovery.

The push reflects a broader turn by AI companies toward scientific research as a way to prove the value of their more capable models. OpenAI, meanwhile, has been working through increasingly advanced mathematical problems with little regard for the academic norms and traditions of the field.