❯ Anthropic says Claude independently discovered a CRISPR-like enzyme system that may be a new gene-editing mechanism, and gene-editing stocks fell

first resultAnthropic said on Sept. 23 that Claude discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, which it named ART (array-associated reverse transcriptase). According to the company, about 950 Claude agents worked for 21 hours and used about 210 million tokens on the search.

how it was foundThe agents collected more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, flagged 3,500 new candidate systems and narrowed them to the 20 most promising. ART combines a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring partner gene and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats, a structure resembling a CRISPR array. Early experiments show the array produces distinct short RNAs when expressed. It is the first result from Anthropic’s Life Sciences Research Group, launched the same day. The group’s Bay Area lab handles only BSL-1 and BSL-2 work, and human scientists still perform all wet-lab experiments.

what is unknownThe company said ART’s function is not yet known, and there is no evidence yet that it can be used for gene editing. Anthropic has released a technical preprint for peer review. Gene-editing stocks including Beam, CRISPR Therapeutics and Intellia traded lower on the day of the announcement, Seeking Alpha reported. Amodei mentioned the discovery in his UN Security Council remarks the same day, calling it “a preliminary finding” that may constitute a new gene-editing mechanism.

▪ SIGNALHundreds of agents working in parallel can now find the candidates. How far this discovery goes depends on how fast human labs can work out what it does.