Scientists question Anthropic's Crispr-like AI discovery claim

Anthropic said on September 23 that its Claude models have identified a new enzyme system with properties the company compared to Crispr, the gene-editing tool that shares its Nobel Prize. According to Anthropic, about 950 Claude agents ran at the same time and found the genetic sequences in 21.5 hours. The company calls the finding ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases — enzymes that copy RNA into DNA, the reverse of how cells normally work.

Researchers prompted Claude to search genomic databases for new examples of reverse transcriptases. The agents flagged more than 200,000 possible candidates, narrowed that list to a few thousand that looked new, then found one unusual family containing a long stretch of repeating DNA sequences that resembled Crispr’s repeat arrays. Anthropic said this ART system turns up in jumbo phages, large viruses that infect bacteria.

Scientists want proof

Outside researchers welcomed the disclosure but questioned how much has actually been confirmed. Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said he “sincerely compliment[s] Anthropic for telling the world about their discovery.” Le Cong, a Stanford professor who works on AI in genome engineering, was more pointed: “The experiments are still in the queue. The PR is already live.” Cong compared the finding to spotting something shiny while scanning a beach for a diamond: the AI found an object worth testing, not proof that it has value.

Seth Shipman of the Gladstone Institutes said he doesn’t think Anthropic found a new Crispr system, but called the method notable. “The novel thing is how they found it, not what it is,” he said. Gill had already identified the same reverse transcriptase in a 2021 paper on jumbo phages; what Claude added, he said, was spotting nearby repeat sequences that hinted at a Crispr-like function. Gill said Claude’s pattern-matching moved faster than manual review, but that ART has no known relationship to any established Crispr system.

Anthropic’s technical report, which has not been peer-reviewed, includes one physical lab experiment. The company has said it does not yet know what the system does. Crispr itself took 25 years to go from its first description in bacteria, in 1987, to a demonstrated gene-cutting tool in 2012, and only one Crispr-based drug has reached the market, approved in late 2023.

Anthropic has not said when further lab testing of ART will begin or be published. Chief executive Dario Amodei has floated the idea of Claude eventually controlling lab equipment to run its own experiments, though he noted that Anthropic’s labs currently operate at the lowest biosafety level. Whether ART cuts, copies or pastes DNA in a way useful for gene editing remains untested outside Anthropic’s own report.