Anthropic’s AI Enzyme Finding Faces Questions and Tests

Anthropic says about 950 Claude AI agents identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in roughly 21 hours, but the finding’s biological role and any gene-editing potential remain unproven. The announcement has also prompted questions from a researcher who says he shared unpublished work on the same system with Claude before the company’s search. Anthropic announced on September 23 that the system, which it calls array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ARTs, was found in jumbo phages, viruses that infect bacteria. The company says its agents searched large genetic databases, identified sequences containing a reverse transcriptase near repeating DNA and located data from a 2022 experiment that it said supported a hypothesis about the system. The prompts used to direct the agents have not been disclosed. Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, says his team first identified the enzymes in 2022 while studying jumbo phages. He says the researchers later analyzed the same 2022 data and shared unpublished findings with Claude, along with drafts of his dissertation and a manuscript. Their research has not yet been published.