Anthropic says Claude found a new enzyme system in bacteriophages, compares it to CRISPR

Anthropic announced that its AI agents autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria. The result is the first output from the company's new wet lab, and it arrives as Anthropic prepares for a public offering and works to prove its models can drive real scientific discovery.

Behind the scenes, roughly 950 instances of Claude searched a massive DNA-sequence database for 21 hours, consuming about 210 million tokens in total. Human involvement was limited to writing the initial prompt and carrying out the physical bench work. One agent flagged an unusual recurring pattern in the sequences for human review; experimental validation followed quickly.

The system, now under investigation, is described by Anthropic as a "previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages." The company openly acknowledges it does not yet understand the system's functional role. The comparison to CRISPR — the gene-editing technology that revolutionized molecular biology — is being made despite the absence of any evidence yet of a comparable practical application.

Anthropic said it chose to disclose the finding early for two reasons: to demonstrate the model's capabilities and to give the scientific community a view of its research direction. The move also supports a push to recruit more researchers to the lab and expand into areas such as drug discovery. It reflects a broader trend: AI companies are racing to produce tangible scientific results that justify the massive investment in ever-larger models. OpenAI, by contrast, has focused on solving advanced mathematical problems while largely sidestepping conventional academic norms.