The discovery is the first result from Anthropic's new wet lab and a major milestone for AI-driven biological research as the company prepares to go public.
Anthropic says Claude autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system with features resembling CRISPR, marking an early result from the company’s new life sciences research lab.
CRISPR is a biological system found in bacteria that scientists adapted into a tool for precisely editing DNA. It has become a foundation for modern gene editing research and medicines.
The system, called array associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, is mainly found in bacteriophages and combines a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. Anthropic said the repeat structure resembles the arrays that help make CRISPR systems programmable.
Claude was given a high level prompt to search a large DNA sequence database for unusual reverse transcriptases. Roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours and used about 210 million tokens searching the data before one identified the repeating DNA pattern.
The agents collected more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, identified 3,500 candidate systems and narrowed them to 20 for deeper analysis. Anthropic said work of that scale could take an expert scientist weeks or months.
AI, tech, and the markets they move—in one daily briefing.
Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy.
The underlying reverse transcriptase had appeared in previous research, but Anthropic said Claude was the first to identify the combination of non coding DNA repeats and an additional accessory protein that defines the system.
Scientists then tested the candidate in Anthropic’s Bay Area laboratory. Early experiments found that the ART repeat array is expressed as distinct short RNAs, though researchers have not yet determined the system’s biological function.
Anthropic has released the work as a preprint and said further experiments are underway. The company cautioned that ART’s function remains unknown despite similarities with other programmable biological systems.
The project comes from a life sciences research group Anthropic formed in spring 2026 to study whether general AI systems can accelerate biological discovery by working alongside scientists across computational analysis and laboratory research.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our