San Francisco (California) [US], September 24 : Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Wednesday (local time) announced a biomedical breakthrough made by its AI system Claude. Amodei announced that Anthropic believes that a Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine could represent a new gene editing mechanism.
According to Anthropic, Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
CRISPR (“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) is a technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms.
"We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. The system that Claude found is based on a reverse transcriptase (RT), enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. While this underlying RT, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in previous studies, Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features—an associated array of non-coding DNA sequences and an additional accessory protein of unknown function," Anthropic said in a statement.
CEO Dario Amodei said that the Anthropic life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery.
"It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years...We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend... As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place," Amodei said in a post on X. 
Amodei says this experiment can improve understanding of biology and help find new therapeutic modalities. 
"Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology...I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology. I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences," he said.
Anthropic said that it hopes this work demonstrates the value of AI-driven hypothesis generation to the wider scientific community. The AI frontier lab also said that they would like to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems, in genomics and in other fields.