Anthropic says Claude found DNA machine with unclear function

Anthropic said Claude discovered a new molecular machine in bacteriophage DNA. Dario Amodei said its precise function, biotechnological utility if any, and significance are not yet clear. Anthropic named the finding ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases. ART appeared next to a repeating DNA stretch resembling a CRISPR array. Reverse transcriptases are enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. Claude analyzed more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases. It narrowed them to 3,500 unusual candidates. It then narrowed those candidates to 20 for closer study. The search took 21 hours. Roughly 950 AI agents worked in parallel. The search used about 210 million tokens. Amodei said the work was something he would have been proud to do as a PhD student. Feng Zhang reviewed the preprint and called it genuinely intriguing. Zhang said the work showed how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. Owen Lewis wrote that human scientists reviewed Claude's hypotheses, selected the most promising candidates, and conducted all the wet-lab work. Claude did not perform the laboratory experiments. If ART proves useful, it remains years away from reaching patients. Shares of CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, and Beam Therapeutics dipped after the announcement. Anthropic said laboratory work is already underway. The company previously said in July that Claude Mythos had cracked post-quantum cryptography. Humans verified that result over hundreds of hours on a signature scheme and a reduced-round cipher variant that nobody had deployed. The current confirmed findings include an unusual protein pattern and no timeline for determining whether it matters.