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

is a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.

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.

Anthropic said it is still working to understand what the enzyme system does, but 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 we’re working on.”

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

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

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