Anthropic reveals how Claude AI helped discover novel CRISPR-like enzyme
Newly discovered enzyme system belongs to bacteriophage DNA
Claude AI has finally made its first-ever Biology debut after discovering a previously unknown and novel enzyme system, showing properties similar to gene-editing technology CRISPR.
Anthropic announced that the discovery of the system belonged to DNA of bacteriophages. With high-level human direction, roughly 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours searching and assessing massive DNA databases and found a novel enzyme system named array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART) found mainly in bacteriophages.
It features repeating DNA sequences next to reverse transcriptase gene and accessory protein, showing resemblance to CRISPR patterns.
CRISPR originated as a natural bacterial immune system used to ward off viral invaders. Today, scientists have leveraged this defense mechanism and transformed it into one of the most powerful and precise tools for DNA editing.
Highlighting the efficiency of AI tools, Anthropic explained that after analyzing 200,000 reverse transcriptases it narrowed down to 3,500 candidates and generated comprehensive reports on top 20. If left on humans, such massive research and compilation will take weeks or months.
Although such underlying RT has been identified in previous studies, Claude unlocks a major breakthrough by recognizing key features of this system and identifying additional protein of unknown function and non-coding DNA sequences.
While Claude autonomously gathered data and formed hypotheses and flagged the anomaly, human researchers and scientists handled the lab testing and biochemical profiling, demonstrating a collaboration between humans and AI agents.
Speaking about the revolutionary role of AI in biology, Dario Amodei wrote on X, “In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend.”
“In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries,” he added.
To prove that this discovery is a major breakthrough, the wider scientific community will need to assess the system and build their own findings and then discover how novel it is from already documented mechanisms.
