Brief
Anthropic says its Claude AI identified a CRISPR‑like enzyme system
The discovery, announced on Sept. 23, was made by 950 Claude agents in 21.5 hours, though its practical use remains uncertain.
By Felo News Desk · Published
Anthropic announced on Sept. 23 that its large‑language model Claude identified an enzyme system in jumbo phages that resembles the gene‑editing tool CRISPR. The company said about 950 Claude agents running in parallel found the sequences in roughly 21.5 hours.
Anthropic calls the system ART (array‑associated reverse transcriptases) and notes that it appears in large viruses that infect bacteria. A technical report, not yet peer‑reviewed, describes how Claude first flagged more than 200,000 candidate reverse transcriptases, narrowed them to a few thousand, and ultimately highlighted an unusual family with long repeat regions similar to CRISPR arrays.
Gene‑editing expert Fyodor Urnov of UC Berkeley praised the public disclosure, while Stanford professor Le Cong cautioned that the experiments are still pending and the press release is already live. Anthropic said it does not yet understand the system’s function and that only a handful of known systems share its features, all capable of cutting, copying and pasting DNA.
Anthropic’s wet‑lab effort is part of a broader push to use AI for biology, but the company acknowledges that further laboratory work is needed to determine whether ART can become a usable gene‑editing tool.
Key facts
- Anthropic announced that Claude identified a CRISPR‑like enzyme system called ART in jumbo phages. (wired.com)
- Approximately 950 Claude agents ran for 21.5 hours to locate the sequences. (wired.com)
- The discovery is described in a technical report that has not been peer‑reviewed. (wired.com)
- Scientists Urvan and Cong expressed cautious optimism and noted pending experiments. (wired.com)
Sources
- [1] wired.com — originally reported as “Anthropic Says It Discovered a Crispr-Like System. Now What?”
