Anthropic said on Wednesday that its AI model, Claude, found a new enzyme system hidden in DNA. The company said the system could be a new way to edit genes, similar to CRISPR.
But Anthropic also said it does not yet know what the system does. CEO Dario Amodei said its "precise function, biotechnological utility (if any)" is not yet clear.
Shares of several gene-editing companies dipped after the news.
How Claude Found the Enzyme System
Claude made the find at the request of researchers at Anthropic's new biology lab in San Francisco. The company said the AI worked "autonomously" during the search.
The system was found inside bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria. It sat next to a repeating stretch of DNA that looks like a CRISPR array.
Anthropic named the find ART. The name is short for array-associated reverse transcriptases, which are enzymes that copy RNA into DNA.
Claude looked through more than 200,000 of these enzymes. It narrowed the list to 3,500 unusual candidates, then to 20 worth closer study.
The search took 21 hours. It used about 950 AI agents working at the same time and roughly 210 million tokens.
Human scientists reviewed Claude's ideas and picked the most promising candidates. They also did all of the lab work.
"At minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student," Amodei said. In a post on X, he said AI is at the "very beginning" of making medical discoveries.
Scientists Offer Mixed Reactions
Feng Zhang, a researcher at MIT and the Broad Institute who helped pioneer CRISPR, reviewed the pre-print. He called the find "genuinely intriguing."
Stanley Qi, a bioengineering professor at Stanford University, called the discovery "incredibly exciting." He said Claude recognized a pattern that was hard to detect before.
Kevin Blake, a microbiologist at Washington University School of Medicine, was more cautious. He said there are countless CRISPR-like sequences in nature that scientists have not yet studied.
"There's nothing to indicate this is a rival to CRISPR-the-technology, or could be developed into any kind of therapeutic or practical application," Blake said.
CRISPR gene editing has been used to treat diseases such as sickle cell disease. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on it.
Even if ART proves useful, it would likely be years away from reaching patients. Anthropic has not claimed otherwise.
In July, Anthropic said its Claude Mythos model had cracked post-quantum cryptography. That result held up after hundreds of hours of human checks.
Shares of CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, and Beam Therapeutics dipped following Wednesday's announcement. Anthropic says lab work to learn what ART does is already underway.
