Anthropic has announced that its Bay Area wet biology lab, confirmed last week, has made what the company believes is a significant discovery: a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, with properties reminiscent of CRISPR. According to Anthropic’s researchers, the system can perform operations such as cutting, copying and pasting DNA.
CEO Dario Amodei said on X that the discovery was made mostly, though not entirely, by Claude, and acknowledged it built on others’ work, noting that a Stanford team had previously found a somewhat similar system. Anthropic said Claude needed only 21 hours of concerted effort, deploying about 950 agents that used 210 million tokens to search through data. The broader research community will need to validate the finding.
The company said all physical experiments were carried out by human scientists, and that the lab works only at biosafety levels 1 and 2 without handling pathogens that infect humans. The news follows Amodei’s recent call to pace the frontier and his stated fears about AI-enabled bioterrorism, alongside his belief that AI could cure most diseases within five to ten years.
Amodei said it may eventually be possible for Claude to safely run experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment with appropriate safeguards, but that Anthropic is not doing so today.
