Claude may have discovered a secret of DNA, and no one knows what it is for.

Before co-founding Anthropic, Dario Amodei completed a biophysics thesis at Princeton and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford School of Medicine. The same man wrote in October 2024, in a long essay, that biology is the field in which AI can contribute the most. In it, he predicted that within five to ten years, AI would “compress” what researchers would have taken 50 to 100 years to accomplish.The company now has a biology laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, which presented its first result on September 23: a genetic system never before described, identified in bacteriophages, viruses specialized in infecting bacteria.

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950 agents, 21 hours and 20 finalists

Around 950 agents Claude worked in parallel for 21 hours, churning through 210 million tokens, the equivalent of more than a thousand novels read and written in under a day. Their mission: to screen more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, enzymes capable of copying RNA into DNA, in the opposite direction to the way your cells read. The screening left 3,500 candidates, then a final list of 20.

The winner was given the name ART, for reverse transcriptases associated with networks of repeats. The system combines one of these enzymes, a partner gene and repeated DNA sequences whose organization resembles CRISPR, the famous genetic scissors that earned a Nobel Prize in 2020. The resemblance ends there for now: no one knows what ART does. The company’s biologists nevertheless verified at the lab bench that the system is indeed expressed in the phage, where RNAs derived from these repeats account for up to 8% of viral RNAs.

A discovery still on probation

The work is published as a preprint hosted by Anthropic, without being deposited on the usual scientific repositories or undergoing peer review. All six of its authors are affiliated with Claude’s publisher: at this stage, the company is correcting its own version. The system’s enzymatic activity has not been demonstrated either.

Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR at MIT, nevertheless finds the approach “truly intriguing” and believes it “merits further investigation”. A Stanford team would also have independently described a similar but distinct system. On the stock market, Beam, Intellia and CRISPR Therapeutics, the listed gene-editing specialists, fell after the announcement.

ART first serves as a proof of concept: a fleet of agents can now sort through in 21 hours what a human team would have taken months to sift through. Functional proof, the step that separates an annotation from a discovery, now remains to be produced, at Anthropic or elsewhere. On the same September 23, before the UN Security Council, Dario Amodei proposed banning the application of AI to biological weapons.

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Source: Anthropic