Anthropic says Claude autonomously discovered a new enzyme system in the DNA of bacteriophages, somewhat similar to CRISPR, the first result from its new biolab

It took nearly 1,000 Claude agents 21 hours and 210 million tokens to uncover the ‘novel enzyme system.’

The Verge 2026-09-24 Robert Hart

Context & Ripple Effects

Anthropic has been assembling the pieces for a scientific-research product line: Claude Life Sciences connected its models with lab tools, and Claude Science added scientific databases and specialized toolkits. Its earlier multi-agent research system supplied the coordination model behind delegating complex work across many agents.

The company had also framed Claude as useful for protein design, chemical analysis and bioinformatics evaluation. The reported bacteriophage finding is therefore a test of whether that research stack can produce candidate biological mechanisms, rather than merely accelerate analysis of known ones.

First-order effects

Anthropic's molecular-biology team gains a candidate enzyme system to characterize, while Claude gains a high-profile research result that tests its science-workbench positioning.
Running nearly 1,000 agents for 21 hours and 210 million tokens makes large-scale agent orchestration, rather than a single model response, central to the reported result.

Second-order effects

Scientists considering Anthropic's access program and Claude Science will have a concrete reason to assess the system for hypothesis generation alongside protein-design and chemical-analysis workflows.
Anthropic's competitors in scientific AI face pressure to demonstrate not only benchmark performance but traceable, experimentally verifiable research outputs from agent teams.

Third-order effects

If independent laboratory work validates discoveries generated this way, scientific-AI competition shifts toward integrated systems that combine models, specialist data tools, multi-agent coordination and human experimental follow-up.
The compute intensity disclosed here makes inference economics a constraint on broad adoption: research organizations will weigh the value of candidate discoveries against the cost of running large agent swarms.

The trend: Scientific AI is moving from assisting discrete analyses toward orchestrating agent teams that search for and prioritize experimentally testable biological hypotheses.

Discussion

@darioamodei Dario Amodei on x
Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism...our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something inte…
@anthropicai @anthropicai on x
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 …
@skupor Scott Kupor on x
Sounds dangerous
@anthropicai @anthropicai on x
This is the first result from our new molecular biology lab, where a team of Anthropic biologists is using Claude to explore and accelerate fundamental biology research. There, Claude works through data and literature to generate hypotheses and candidate biological systems to stu…
@rand_longevity Rand on x
people forget that dario has a phd in biophysics his endgame has always been controlling biology, its just amazing to see it actually happening
@dgt10011 Jeff Park on x
When I was a junior/senior in high school, I was a Waksman scholar where under Rutgers leadership my team sequenced novel C remanei genes and used RNAi to test their functions in C elegans It was the best of times, it was the worst of times but at least I was in a real lab
@nc_frey Nathan C. Frey on x
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:
@alexharding7 Alex Harding on x
There are countless CRISPR-like sequences hidden in genomes of many organisms (eg @Basecamp_Res). Well-known. Vast majority not interesting. This isn't a noteworthy discovery. The hype level leads me to question how serious @AnthropicAI is about its biotech effort (I really hope …
@brendannyhan Brendan Nyhan on x
Stochastic parrots!!! ... (checks notes) autonomously discovering novel enzyme systems
@naderlikeladder Nader Khalil on x
This is very exciting. But the rhetoric needs to stop: “The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude
@packym Packy McCormick on x
pretty messed up that anthropic just had claude create New CRISPR just to pump the IPO price 🙄
@crispr_lucas Lucas Harrington on x
As someone who did this kind of genome mining work during my PhD, some thoughts on this Anthropic announcement...they described an unusual reverse transcriptase (RT) associated with a repetitive DNA array and an unknown accessory protein...people have been finding RTs associated …
@dgt10011 Jeff Park on x
I think one of the biggest gaps in people's understanding of scientific research today, even understanding what's valuable/what's the bottleneck etc. is that you need an actual hypothesis before you can run an experiment You need to have some actual lightning of curiosity, you ha…
@dkthomp Derek Thompson on x
1. I think this is v cool. 2. It will be years before we know if this discovery is anything like “the next CRISPR.
@ntperry13 Nicholas Perry on x
Thrilled to share news of our team and the research we're doing at Anthropic! Over the last year, the advance of Claude's capabilities in biology has been breathtaking. As “traditional
@kimmonismus @kimmonismus on x
Dario Amodei still believes AI could “cure most diseases in 5-10 years,” and Anthropic's latest discovery offers an early glimpse of the research he thinks could get us there. He calls that goal “barely possible
@stevesi Steven Sinofsky on x
10% chance this goes horribly wrong and is uncontrollable?
@mattshumer_ Matt Shumer on x
The models are just stochastic parrots, right?
@ziv_ravid Ravid Shwartz Ziv on x
The sad thing is that Dario knows better. He was a PhD student. He knows the significance level of this result. He knows that if he had walked into Bill's office (his advisor) with “we found an interesting system, but we still don't know what it does” and said he was ready to …
@provisionalidea James Rosen-Birch on x
“a bunch of scientific experts with deep domain expertise designed and maintained a computational biology pipeline to suggest candidates, evaluated the results, and tested the most promising ones” is not “Claude discovered it” this is so gross
@taliaringer Talia Ringer on x
“Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment” I will confess, @allTheYud and other doomers, that I really overestimated humanity and thought that nobody could possibly be this stupid
@kantrowitz Alex Kantrowitz on x
Not to be that guy but potentially unaligned AI in the wet lab freaks me out if it can do this... [embedded post]
@jrkelly Jason Kelly on x
At @ginkgo we've been experiencing that to keep autonomous labs busy you need agents planning experiments and interpreting data — so I really like this approach from @anthropic in general. Autonomous labs need AI and AI needs autonomous labs to do science (at scale).
@eric_kabrams Eric Abrams on x
Discoveries like CRISPR, Taq polymerase (PCR), and restriction enzymes all came from looking closely at things that already exist in nature and finding useful tools. These kinds of discoveries, ones that reshape entire fields, come along only once in a while. We set up a research…
@signulll @signulll on x
the coolest thing about a new technological revolution like ai is that it forces you to rethink nearly every assumption about how the world used to work (kinda like how elon approaches every big problem). e.g. at one layer personal agents are trying to reshape how ppl manage thei…
@tjl Tom Lee on x
it's cool that Claude found something that looks like it might be CRISPR-like. but let's not go *too* crazy. from the pop science press I'm aware of at least two post-CRISPR systems of this type that humans have found (Vipr, Fanzor). The NYT has written about this!
@iterintellectus Vittorio on x
this is absolutely incredible we are watching AI begin to discover entirely new biological systems that humans didn't even know existed. AI is actually expanding the frontier of biology itself. once again, this is the age of biotech.
@kylewilsontharp Kyle Tharp on x
My general free comms advice to the AI industry is to come up with a different term for this than “wet lab” lol
@suchenzang Susan Zhang on x
77 agent-hours over 21.5 hours of wall-clock time, so roughly ~4 parallel agents working at once? isn't that... low? (navier-stokes was supposedly 88 hours of wall-clock time, ~10k agents) tech report also does not mention anything about what has been tested in the wet lab (inten…
Stanley Zhou Stanley Zhou on linkedin
Anthropic announced they discovered a new enzyme system like CRISPR through Claude assistance. — They released a pre-print about the work alongside …
@timkellogg.me Mr. Tim on bluesky
Anthropic has a wet lab in SF where they're using Claude to accelerate fundamental biology research — This is the first big result from that lab — discovery of a CRISPR-like enzyme — www.anthropic.com/news/claude- ...
@stephenturner.us Stephen Turner on bluesky
Probably the wrong platform to post anything remotely positive about AI, but reading through this and Dario's X post, it's pretty exciting stuff www.anthropic.com/news/claude- ...
r/accelerate r on reddit
When are we saturating biology ?? What's the benchmarks? Cure to cancer ? Balding reversal? Seems like the floodgates are about to be open .
r/EverythingScience r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats \ Anthropic
r/technology r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
r/labrats r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
r/singularity r on reddit
Claude discovered a novel enzyme system with properties reminiscent of CRISPR
r/accelerate r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
r/slatestarcodex r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
r/technology r on reddit
Anthropic's biolab made a discovery it's comparing to Crispr
r/ArtificialInteligence r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system
r/france r on reddit
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system

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