Anthropic says its biology lab has already made a major discovery
Anthropic reports that its AI model Claude helped identify a new enzyme system with properties resembling CRISPR. The company says the discovery was mostly made by Claude, though physical lab work is still carried out by humans.
Anthropic has announced that its recently confirmed wet biology lab in the Bay Area has already produced what the company calls a significant discovery. Using its AI model to guide physical experiments, the lab says it identified a previously unknown enzyme system hidden within the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria.
Researchers say the newly found system shares properties reminiscent of CRISPR, the naturally occurring bacterial immune mechanism that has become a widely used gene-editing tool. The system is reportedly capable of operations resembling cutting, copying, and pasting DNA. Anthropic acknowledges that the broader scientific community will need to validate how significant or novel the finding truly is.
Claude's role in the discovery
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on X that the discovery builds on prior work by others, noting that a Stanford team had previously found a system similar in some respects. Still, the company emphasizes that this particular system was found mostly, though not entirely, by Claude. The lab launched this spring, and according to the team, Claude spent roughly 21 hours on the effort, deploying about 950 agents that processed 210 million tokens.
The announcement comes shortly after AI industry leaders, including Amodei, publicly acknowledged that models have grown capable — and potentially dangerous — enough that the industry needs to slow down and build out safety-testing procedures. Amodei has previously cited fears that AI could be misused for bioterrorism, while also stating his belief that AI could help cure most diseases within five to ten years.
Anthropic stresses that the lab operates only at lower biosafety risk levels (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and does not handle pathogens capable of infecting humans. All physical lab work is carried out by human scientists rather than the AI itself. Amodei did not rule out a future in which Claude could autonomously operate lab equipment under appropriate safeguards, though that is not happening currently.
AI-driven biology research is not unique to Anthropic. Stanford researchers have published work combining large language models with CRISPR, UC San Francisco scientists have used AI to design enzymes from scratch, and Google introduced its AlphaFold tool back in 2020.
