Anthropic says Claude agents autonomously found a novel enzyme system
A vendor-reported case of AI moving from tool to autonomous hypothesis generator; functional validation and reproducibility remain open.
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Anthropic says its Claude agents discovered a previously unreported enzyme system in phage DNA, which the team named ART.
Roughly 950 agent sessions spent 21.5 hours and 215.6 million tokens scanning metagenomic databases; one agent read the DNA sequence into its context and noticed a tandem repeat array resembling CRISPR, the repeat-sequence structure underpinning gene editing. Subsequent sequence and transcriptome analysis in the lab supports this being a new family.
But the enzyme's activity and function are unverified experimentally, and rerunning the same task ten times never rediscovered the array. Lucas Harrington of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna's lab argues that finding an odd repeat array is usually the easy part; working out what the system does is the real discovery.