We’ve set up a molecular biology lab at Anthropic and we’re announcing our first discovery! Claude discovered a new CRISPR-like enzyme. 950 …

We’ve set up a molecular biology lab at Anthropic and we’re announcing our first discovery! Claude discovered a new CRISPR-like enzyme. 950 agents spent 21 hours searching through a database of DNA sequences until one of the agents found something striking: “[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!”. After analysis and testing in our lab, we found that the sequence is a previously uncharacterized enzyme system. We don’t know what it does yet, but it has features reminiscent of CRISPR. Our lab looks like a typical molecular biology lab. Our research only involves the lower-levels of biosafety risk level; we don’t handle pathogens that can infect humans, and all the lab work is performed by human scientists. We’re sharing these early findings with the community to show how Claude can be used to accelerate fundamental research in biology. Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known …

Source: Emad Mostaque (X) | 2026-09-23