Anthropic's Biology Lab Claims AI-Driven Discovery of CRISPR-Like Enzyme System
Last week, Anthropic confirmed that it operates a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its AI models to run physical experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that the lab has already produced what it considers a major discovery: a new enzyme "system" with certain "properties reminiscent of CRISPR," as Anthropic describes it.
CRISPR is a natural immune system that bacteria use to fight off viruses and has become a widely used gene-editing technology among researchers.
What Anthropic Says It Found
Essentially, Anthropic says it identified a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages—viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. According to Anthropic's researchers, this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can "perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA."
It will be up to the broader research community to validate how significant or genuinely novel this discovery is. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledges that the finding was based on the work of others and that a Stanford team previously discovered a system "that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found," he wrote on X.
But Amodei and Anthropic are not just emphasizing the discovery itself. They are also touting that it was found "mostly, though not entirely, by Claude," the CEO wrote.
A 21-Hour Discovery
On one hand, that is astounding. This lab was only established this spring (though Anthropic declined to specify exactly how many months it has been open). A discovery in just a few short months would already be speedy work, but the team said it actually only took Claude 21 hours of concerted effort. Claude searched through data using about 950 agents that consumed 210 million tokens.
Still, the revelation that Anthropic has been conducting biology experiments comes right after AI CEOs—including Amodei—publicly admitted that models have become so capable, and so potentially dangerous, that the industry must slow down and develop safety-testing procedures. This follows a couple of his employees publicly stating earlier this month that there's a risk AI could kill us all.
Amodei himself has said one of the things he fears most is that AI could be used for bioterrorism. But he also believes AI will "cure most diseases in 5-10 years," he wrote. So Anthropic has clearly decided the rewards are worth the risks.
Humans Still in the Loop
Given that context, perhaps the biggest reveal in this news isn't the discovery itself but that the biology lab hasn't let Claude run autonomously. The physical experiments were performed by humans.
"Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists."
It's also true that AI-powered biological research is hardly unique to Anthropic. Researchers from Stanford recently published a paper on a ...
via TechCrunch AI