Anthropic’s Claude finds a CRISPR-like enzyme system in phage DNA

Anthropic says Claude agents autonomously discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages that pairs a reverse transcriptase with a CRISPR-like array of DNA repeats — an early result from the company’s new life-sciences lab aimed at using AI to mine nature’s molecular machines.

In a September 23 report, Anthropic described how researchers prompted Claude to search a massive DNA database for interesting reverse transcriptases. About 950 agents running for roughly 21 hours and using some 210 million tokens gathered more than 200,000 RTs, proposed about 3,500 candidate systems and narrowed them to 20 human-readable reports. One agent flagged a tandem repeat array beside an odd-looking RT gene in a jumbo phage — a pattern that, after lab follow-up, the team named array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART.

The underlying RT had appeared in earlier studies; Claude’s novel observation was the associated non-coding repeat array and a neighbouring accessory protein of unknown function. First experiments show the ART array is expressed as distinct short RNAs, a hallmark shared with a handful of programmable DNA-cutting and copying systems. CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang called the identification of RNA-repeat arrays with reverse transcriptases “genuinely intriguing” and worthy of further study. Anthropic stresses that ART’s catalytic activity and any gene-editing utility remain unproven; a preprint details the work.

All wet-lab steps were done by human scientists under BSL-1 and BSL-2 conditions — no human pathogens. For Canadian genomics and biotech groups already experimenting with agentic literature and sequence mining, the takeaway is less that AI “invented CRISPR 2.0” and more that unsupervised anomaly spotting at genome scale can surface systems worth the scarce bench hours that follow.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Consult a qualified healthcare professional for personal medical decisions.

Sources: Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats — Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system | Autonomous AI agents discover reverse transcriptases with tandem repeat arrays — Anthropic preprint PDF: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326b2f208a071.pdf | Anthropic Says Its A.I. Discovered a New Enzyme System That Resembles CRISPR — Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/anthropic-says-its-ai-discovered-a-new-enzyme-system-that-resembles-the-revolutionary-gene-editing-tool-crispr-180989578/