New to this? Read it in simple words
- Anthropic says its AI, Claude, found an overlooked group of genes in viruses that infect bacteria.
- The genes sit next to repeated pieces of DNA, a pattern that looks like CRISPR.
- Anthropic’s own lab did a first test. No outside scientists have checked the work yet.
- Nobody knows yet what the system does, or if it will ever be useful.
- CRISPR
- A natural defence system in bacteria that scientists turned into a tool for editing genes.
- Enzyme
- A protein that speeds up a chemical reaction in a living thing.
- Peer review
- When independent experts check a study before a journal publishes it.
Anthropic has set up a life sciences research group with its own laboratory. On September 23, it said the group’s first result came from Claude: an overlooked enzyme system in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. Anthropic calls it ART and posted a preprint on its own website.
What Claude found
ART stands for array-associated reverse transcriptases. It has three parts: an enzyme that copies RNA into DNA, a partner gene with an unknown role, and a row of evenly spaced DNA repeats.
Those spaced repeats look like the arrays in CRISPR, the bacterial defence system behind today’s best-known gene-editing tools. The resemblance is in the layout. Anthropic has not shown that ART cuts or edits DNA.
The enzyme itself was already known from earlier studies of a large phage. Anthropic says Claude was the first to notice the repeat array and the partner protein next to it.
Chief executive Dario Amodei wrote on X that a Stanford team had earlier found a system that is similar in some ways.
All lab results so far come from Anthropic’s own lab. The preprint is not peer-reviewed.
How the search worked
Anthropic says about 950 Claude agents searched for 21 hours and used around 210 million tokens. They screened more than 200,000 enzymes, narrowed them to 3,500 candidates, and wrote 20 reports for scientists.
According to the preprint, as reported by The Next Web, the agents ran on Claude Mythos 5. When Anthropic repeated the same search ten more times, every rerun missed the repeat array.
People wrote the first instructions, reviewed the reports, chose what to test, and did all the lab work. Claude searched the data, picked candidates, wrote the reports, and helped interpret the results.
Anthropic’s own scientists ran the first test in its Bay Area lab. They found that the repeat array is turned into distinct short RNAs. No outside lab has tested the system yet.
Not a CRISPR rival yet
The work has not been peer-reviewed. The preprint is posted only on Anthropic’s website, and no data or code has been released.
What ART does in nature is unknown. So is whether its enzyme is active, and whether it could ever become a useful tool.
Stanford bioengineer Stanley Qi told Al Jazeera the finding is very exciting. Microbiologist Kevin Blake of Washington University School of Medicine was more careful: “There’s nothing to indicate this is a rival to CRISPR-the-technology”.
Some early reports described ART as a new gene-editing tool. Amodei wrote only that Anthropic suspects this, and that the system’s function and importance are not yet clear.
Anthropic says its lab works only at biosafety levels 1 and 2 and handles no human pathogens.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1Primary source · September 23, 2026Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats Anthropic
- 2Research · September 23, 2026Anthropic says Claude AI helped discover novel enzyme system Reuters via KSL
- 3Research · September 23, 2026Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big TechCrunch
- 4Research · September 23, 2026Anthropic says Claude found a new enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats The Next Web
- 5Research · September 24, 2026AI model Claude discovers CRISPR-like enzyme system, Anthropic says Al Jazeera
- 6Research · September 18, 2026Anthropic is operating a lab that conducts biology experiments TechCrunch
All lab results are Anthropic’s own, and no outside lab has repeated them. Details from the preprint follow The Next Web’s reporting.
Anthropic says Claude found a new enzyme system. Silicon AI News, September 24, 2026. https://siliconainews.com/stories/claude-art-enzyme-discovery
Claude spotted an overlooked enzyme system, a promising early result, but the work is not peer-reviewed and its function is unknown. How we rate the mood
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