Anthropic's wet lab says Claude helped find a CRISPR-like enzyme system

Anthropic said this week that the wet biology lab it confirmed operating last week has already produced what the company calls a major scientific find. Researchers there say Claude helped identify a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect and replicate inside bacteria.

The system has, in Anthropic’s words, “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” the natural bacterial immune mechanism that has become a widely used gene-editing tool for researchers. Anthropic says the newly found system can perform operations like cutting, copying and pasting DNA, much as CRISPR does.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on X that the discovery came together “mostly, though not entirely” through Claude’s own work. According to Anthropic, Claude searched through data using about 950 agents that consumed roughly 210 million tokens, arriving at the result in about 21 hours of concerted effort. The lab itself was set up only this spring, though Anthropic has not said exactly how many months it has been running.

Amodei was careful to note that the finding builds on earlier research by others. A team at Stanford previously identified a system he says is “in some ways similar” to the one Claude found. It will be up to outside scientists to confirm how significant, or how new, Anthropic’s discovery actually is, and that validation has not yet happened.

Humans still run the equipment

Anthropic emphasized that no part of the physical lab work was automated. “Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab,” the company said, adding that it works only with lower-risk biosafety levels, BSL-1 and BSL-2, classifications covering pathogens unlikely to cause serious disease, and does not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All bench work, Anthropic said, is performed by human scientists, with Claude confined to the data analysis.

The announcement lands weeks after Amodei and other AI company leaders said publicly that the industry needs to slow down and build safety-testing procedures as models grow more capable, following comments from employees at his own company warning of catastrophic AI risk. Amodei has previously named bioterrorism as one of his biggest fears about AI, while also predicting the technology will “cure most diseases in 5-10 years.”

Anthropic is not alone in applying AI to biology. Stanford researchers recently published a paper on using large language models alongside CRISPR, UC San Francisco scientists have used AI to design enzymes from scratch, and Google’s AlphaFold has been in use since 2020. Amodei has not ruled out a future where Claude operates lab equipment on its own, saying that could eventually be possible “with appropriate safeguards in place,” though he said that is not happening today.

What happens next depends on outside researchers examining Anthropic’s claims about the enzyme system, and on whether Anthropic says more about how long the lab has been running or what it plans to study next.