Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic says Claude found new enzyme system
Anthropic said its Claude system identified a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA after a long search through sequence data, which the company presented as its first result from a new wet lab.
- Anthropic said Claude had autonomously discovered a new enzyme system that it compared with the machinery behind Crispr.
- The company said the result came from its newly launched wet lab and was an early test of Claude for science.
- Anthropic said nearly 950 Claude agents worked for 21 hours and used 210 million tokens before one flagged a repeating pattern for review.
- Further analysis and lab testing found a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in bacteriophages.
- Anthropic said it was still trying to understand what the system did and wanted to share the finding early.
Anthropic said its Claude system had autonomously found a new enzyme system that it compared with Crispr. The company said the work was the first result from its newly launched wet lab.
According to Anthropic, almost 950 Claude agents searched through a large DNA sequence database for 21 hours. The company said its scientists were involved only at the start, when they supplied the prompt, and later in lab work.
Anthropic said one agent identified a repeating pattern and sent it for human review. It said further analysis and testing showed a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in bacteriophages, which infect bacteria.
The company said it was still working out the system’s function. It said it chose to describe the result early so others could see the finding and the model’s capabilities.
The article said the practical use of the discovery was still unclear. It also said Anthropic was trying to draw more scientists to its lab and expand into drug discovery, while other AI firms were also using scientific work to show model capability.
Named in this story
Companies
- Anthropic
- said Claude had found the enzyme system and described the lab work
- OpenAI
- was named as another AI company pursuing scientific research
Products and systems
- Claude
- was the AI system Anthropic said did the search and flagged the pattern
- Crispr
- was the gene-editing technology used as a comparison
How the source tells it
The piece mixed corporate self-presentation with caution, using novelty and comparison to frame the finding while also noting that its value and uses were still uncertain.
- hype a company claim is presented as a notable first result from a new lab
- novelty the finding is framed as the first output of a recently launched research effort
- speculation a comparison to an established gene-editing system is made before any practical use has been shown