Anthropic reported on the result of its new biological team's work, in which the Claude model independently went through a significant part of the path from analyzing genomic data to forming a scientific hypothesis. The AI discovered a previously undescribed system in bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacteria. It was named ART (array-associated reverse transcriptases). At the core of the system is a reverse transcriptase capable of copying information from RNA to DNA. Next to the enzyme, Claude discovered a long array of repeating DNA segments and an additional protein with an unknown function. The array structure resembles some natural systems associated with CRISPR, but the function of ART in the cell has not yet been established.
About 950 AI agents were used for the search. After receiving a general request from humans to find unusual reverse transcriptases in a large DNA sequence database, they processed about 210 million tokens in 21 hours. The system collected more than 200,000 enzymes, highlighted approximately 3,500 potentially interesting variants, and narrowed them down to 20 of the most promising candidates. When analyzing one of them, the AI noticed a nearby array of repeats resembling a CRISPR-like structure. The finding was then passed on to biologists for experimental verification. In the laboratory, Anthropic scientists established that ART indeed produces a set of short RNA molecules, but their function remains the subject of further research.
The work is published as a preprint and has not yet undergone independent scientific peer review. Anthropic's head, Dario Amodei, noted that Claude performed a large, but not the entire part of the research: specialists determined the direction of the search, and humans then verified the proposed hypothesis with experiments. Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR and a professor at MIT and the Broad Institute, called the result an example of the potential contribution of AI agents to biological research and noted interest in the discovered structure. The Anthropic laboratory operates at biosafety levels BSL-1 and BSL-2, and experiments are conducted by scientists. Thus, at this stage, AI helped transition from large-scale sequence analysis to a testable hypothesis, while the biological significance of the ART system is yet to be determined.
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