Anthropic Launches Life Sciences Team, Claude Discovers New Enzyme System

Anthropic announced the creation of a life sciences research team and its own molecular biology lab, sharing early results from Claude's work in biology. With humans only providing broad research direction, Claude independently discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system, named Array-associated Reverse Transcriptases (ART).

The discovery came from Anthropic's San Francisco Bay Area lab. About 950 Claude agents consumed roughly 210 million tokens in 21 hours, narrowing over 200,000 reverse transcriptases down to about 3,500 new candidate systems, then to 20 top candidates. One agent noticed an unusual tandem repeat array next to a reverse transcriptase gene while processing a phage DNA sequence.

The ART system has three parts: a reverse transcriptase, a companion gene, and a long non-coding DNA repeat array similar in structure to CRISPR arrays. Early experiments show the array is biologically active, but its exact function remains unclear. CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang reviewed the preprint and called it an exciting case of AI-driven biological discovery.

Anthropic says scaling this genomic mining approach could cut analysis time from weeks to hours.