Anthropic’s wet lab says Claude found a bacteriophage enzyme system it compares to Crispr
Anthropic says Claude autonomously discovered a new enzyme system similar to the machinery behind Crispr, The Verge's Robert Hart reports (Sep. 23, 6:00pm UTC). It is the first result from Anthropic's newly launched wet lab, a real chemistry and biology bench setup rather than software alone, and an early test of Claude for science as the company prepares to go public, on Verge's framing.
Anthropic says Claude searched a massive DNA-sequence database, with scientists' involvement limited to the initial prompt and lab work. Over 21 hours, nearly 950 Claude agents worked through 210 million tokens. One spotted an unusual repeating pattern and flagged it for human review.
Further analysis and lab testing point to a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Anthropic is still working to understand what the system does. The company says it felt important to share early to demonstrate Claude's capabilities and give the broader community insight.
The Next Web adds that next to the enzyme's gene sits a long run of repeating DNA that resembles a CRISPR array. The company does not yet know what the system does. Anthropic announced the result in a blog post and a preprint that has not been peer reviewed, and the team calls the system array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. TNW says ART has three parts: the enzyme, a partner gene beside it, and an array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. The layout recalls CRISPR, where an array holds a bank of different RNA guides. According to the preprint, ART arrays hold 3 to 21 copies of a short repeat and lack the cas genes CRISPR systems carry nearby.
Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer at MIT and the Broad Institute, reviewed the preprint. Anthropic published his comment with its post. "The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation," Zhang said.
The Verge notes it remains unclear whether the discovery will have any practical applications, let alone prove as transformative as Crispr. The premature announcement comes as Anthropic seeks to attract more scientists to its lab and expand into areas like drug discovery, with OpenAI's math push as peer color only.
TNW also covers Amodei's Security Council brief the same day, where he cited the finding as preliminary.
The first claimed scientific result from the wet lab landed with a Crispr comparison before the company knew the enzyme's job, and Amodei put the preliminary finding into the UN brief the same afternoon. The science URL is also a recruiting pitch.
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