CLAUDE AUTONOMOUSLY DISCOVERED A NEW BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM
Anthropic says Claude identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA with CRISPR-like repeat arrays, which it calls ART.
Around 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours and 210M tokens analyzing 200,000+ reverse transcriptases, finding 3,500 candidate systems and narrowing them to 20 before flagging ART for human review.
Anthropic scientists then validated the system in its new molecular biology lab.
Its function is still unknown, but Anthropic says the few known systems with similar features are programmable and can perform operations like cutting, copying and pasting DNA.
The company says this is the first result from its new life sciences lab, where Claude generates biological hypotheses and human scientists test the most promising ones experimentally.