Anthropic says Claude agents found a new enzyme system in phage DNA

On 23 September, Anthropic launched an in-house molecular biology group with its own Bay Area wet lab, and disclosed its first result.

What happened

• about 950 Claude agents ran for about 21 hours, using about 210 million tokens
• they screened more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases and narrowed 3,500 candidates down to 20
• they surfaced a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, which Anthropic calls array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART)

Its repeat array is structurally similar to CRISPR, and its function is unknown. Human scientists did the lab work, and the accompanying preprint hasn't been peer reviewed. CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang reviewed it and called it "genuinely intriguing".

Why it matters

This was the ai story everyone ran. It sits with the other two because it's another outsider in someone else's field: a chatbot company doing molecular biology, whose agents flagged something before anyone could say what it is.