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Sam's News — science — 2026-09-29

Science

8 Anthropic's Claude AI discovers novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like properties

Anthropic announced that its Claude AI model autonomously discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system associated with DNA repeats, resembling CRISPR in structure and potential function. The discovery emerged from Claude analyzing massive DNA sequence databases with minimal human direction, marking a significant milestone in AI-assisted biological research.

  • Claude discovered a reverse transcriptase-based enzyme system with associated non-coding DNA sequences and accessory proteins, a combination previously found in only a handful of other systems
  • The research involved 950 Claude agents spending 21 hours and using 210 million tokens to search DNA sequence databases
  • Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer at MIT and the Broad Institute, called the identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases "genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation"
  • Anthropic formed a dedicated life sciences research group and built its own laboratory to systematically use Claude for fundamental biology research

Sources: Anthropic AI Web Searched