Anthropic says its Claude AI has found a previously unknown enzyme system inside viruses that infect bacteria, and its layout looks a lot like CRISPR, the natural machinery behind the world’s best-known gene editing tool. The company has named it array-associated reverse transcriptase, or ART, and says Claude did most of the work after its scientists gave it a single broad prompt.
Anthropic says roughly 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours combing through a massive database of DNA sequences, using 210 million tokens along the way. They gathered more than 200,000 RTs, shortlisted 3,500 new candidate systems and narrowed those to 20, each with a report written for human review.
CEO Dario Amodei said as much in a post on X, noting that its precise function, biotech usefulness “(if any)” and significance are not yet clear. “But at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student,” he wrote. Anthropic says Claude appears to be the first to notice the array and the accessory protein around it. The company says this kind of analysis can take an expert scientist weeks to months. Amodei says humans working with AI can validate key results in a few weeks, and that Claude may one day run lab equipment itself with safeguards in place, though Anthropic isn’t doing that yet.
The finding is the first result from Anthropic’s new life sciences research group and wet lab, set up in the Bay Area this spring. What ART does is still unknown. Early lab tests show the array is expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs, which suggests ART may work in a way similar to CRISPR. Experiments to confirm its function are ongoing, and a pre-print is already out. Biology, of course, needs lab work. Anthropic now plans to expand its life sciences team and is inviting outside scientists to pitch collaborations. Whether ART ever becomes a tool on the scale of CRISPR is anyone’s guess. What Anthropic has shown is that Claude can find something in public DNA data that had been sitting there, unnoticed, until now.
The RT itself, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in earlier research.