Anthropic says Claude agents found a new enzyme system in DNA data
The company says about 950 agents searched sequence databases for 21 hours and turned up a reverse transcriptase next to a repeat array.
Anthropic said on Tuesday that agents running on its Claude models had found a new enzyme system in bacteriophages, which it calls array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART. The company said the system pairs a reverse transcriptase with an accessory protein of unknown function and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats.
The search is the company's own account, and no outside group has yet reproduced it. Anthropic said about 950 agents spent 21 hours and 210 million tokens reading a database of DNA sequences, gathering more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, narrowing those to about 3,500 candidate systems, and writing up the 20 it found most compelling.
The comparison to CRISPR is Anthropic's. The company described the repeat array as "a pattern reminiscent of CRISPR", and The Verge reported the company is comparing the find to the gene-editing tool. What ART does is not established. "Although we don't yet know its function, the system that Claude discovered has a set of characteristics" worth following, Anthropic wrote, adding that its work on the primary function is ongoing.
Human scientists did the bench work, at Anthropic's Bay Area laboratory at biosafety levels 1 and 2. The company said its first experiments show the ART array is also expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs, and said that suggests something analogous to CRISPR may be at play. Anthropic has posted a preprint with the detail.
One outside researcher has commented. Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, who worked on CRISPR gene editing, said the identification of RNA-repeat arrays sitting next to reverse transcriptases "is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation". He did not say the finding was confirmed.