Anthropic says Claude found an unknown enzyme system in bacterial viruses
It is the first result from Anthropic's new biology lab. Nearly 1,000 Claude agents worked for 21 hours and used 210 million tokens, according to the company.
The system sits in the DNA of bacteriophages. Next to the enzyme's gene is a long array of repeating DNA, a structure Anthropic says looks somewhat like CRISPR. The company wrote on X that it does not yet know what the system does, and that the few known systems with these features can cut, copy and paste DNA.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on X that the discovery's precise function, biotech utility and significance are not yet clear. According to Amodei, the life sciences team suggested a broad research area, Claude read the literature and genome data, found the system and proposed the experiments, and the human team ran them in the lab. Anthropic's post on X passed 13,000 likes.
Sources: Anthropic (X) · Dario Amodei (X) · Techmeme