950 Claude Agents ran for 21 hours and discovered a biological system that humans had missed.

Beating AI News Flash: Anthropic's self-built molecular biology lab has published its first result. Human scientists gave Claude only one direction—to search massive DNA datasets for novel reverse transcriptases worth studying, enzymes that can write RNA information back into DNA. About 950 Claude Agents ran for 21 hours, screening more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases down to 3,500 candidate systems, and finally narrowing it to 20 key targets.

One Agent discovered that a strange reverse transcriptase was flanked by large amounts of regularly repeated DNA, looking very much like CRISPR. CRISPR is a natural DNA defense system in bacteria that was later engineered by humans into a gene-editing tool capable of following RNA "guidance" to find and cut specific DNA. Claude then counted the repeat sequences itself, analyzed the spacing, compared known systems, and searched papers, ultimately determining that a biological system may be hidden here that had not previously been fully identified. Anthropic named it ART.

Human scientists then verified it in the lab. ART mainly exists in phages, viruses that specifically infect bacteria. It consists of a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring protein of unknown function, and a long stretch of repeated DNA. Experiments confirmed that these repeated DNA sequences produce multiple short RNAs. A small number of known systems with similar structures can cut, copy, or rewrite DNA, so Anthropic is continuing to study whether ART also has similar capabilities.

It is still unknown what ART actually does, and it cannot be said that it can already edit genes. The reverse transcriptase within it had been studied before; what Claude newly discovered was the complete association between it and the neighboring repeated DNA and unknown protein. This time, Claude was also not told in advance to look for ART. Instead, it discovered the anomaly on its own from a large number of candidates, continued investigating, and then handed the results to humans for experiments. Anthropic says that if this kind of analysis were done entirely by experts, it would usually take weeks to months.