Anthropic says Claude helped find enzyme system resembling CRISPR

Anthropic says its wet biology lab in the Bay Area has identified a previously unknown enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA. The company says the system has properties reminiscent of CRISPR and can perform operations such as cutting, copying and pasting DNA.

Anthropic says Claude found the system mostly, though not entirely, after 21 hours of concentrated work. The model searched data with about 950 agents that used 210 million tokens. CEO Dario Amodei said the result builds on earlier work, including a Stanford team’s discovery of a system similar in some ways. The broader research community will need to determine how significant and novel the finding is.

The lab was established this spring, although Anthropic has not said how many months it has operated. Human scientists performed all physical experiments. Anthropic says the lab conducts only lower-level biosafety work, in BSL-1 and BSL-2, and does not handle pathogens that can infect humans.

Amodei said a fully automated lab could eventually be possible with safeguards, but Claude is not controlling lab equipment today. The announcement places Anthropic alongside other AI biology efforts, including Google’s AlphaFold, launched in 2020, and research from Stanford and UC San Francisco.