Anthropic's biolab made a discovery it's comparing to Crispr

Anthropic announced that its AI system Claude "autonomously discovered" a new enzyme system similar to the machinery behind the gene-editing tool Crispr. This is the first result from Anthropic's newly launched wet lab. According to the company, nearly 950 Claude agents worked for over 21 hours, processing 210 million tokens, to search through a massive DNA sequence database. One agent spotted an unusual repeating pattern and flagged it for human review; further analysis and lab testing revealed a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages, a type of virus that infects bacteria. Anthropic says scientists' involvement was limited to the initial prompt and lab work. The purpose of the enzyme system remains unknown, and it is unclear whether the discovery will have any practical applications, let alone be as transformative as Crispr. The premature announcement comes as Anthropic prepares to go public and seeks to attract more scientists to its lab and expand into drug discovery. This reflects a broader trend of AI companies turning to scientific research to demonstrate the value of their more capable models, with OpenAI similarly advancing through increasingly advanced mathematical problems.

(Source：The Verge)