Sam's News — science — 2026-10-01

Science

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

Anthropic's Claude AI has autonomously discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system associated with DNA repeats that resembles CRISPR in structure and potential function. The discovery, made by AI agents searching genomic databases, identifies a reverse transcriptase system with accessory proteins and non-coding DNA sequences that may perform programmable DNA operations.

• Claude discovered a reverse transcriptase-based enzyme system with associated RNA-repeat arrays and accessory proteins of unknown function
• The system was identified after 21 hours of searching by approximately 950 Claude agents using 210 million tokens across a massive DNA sequence database
• Feng Zhang, MIT CRISPR pioneer, confirmed the finding is 'genuinely intriguing' and merits further investigation
• The discovery demonstrates AI agents can autonomously identify novel biological systems with minimal human direction beyond initial prompting

Sources: Anthropic AI Web Searched