Anthropic’s AI Claude identifies intriguing DNA stretch in bacteriophages

Anthropic just gave its AI model Claude a biology homework assignment, and Claude may have aced it. The company announced on September 23 that a swarm of roughly 950 autonomous Claude agents discovered a previously unrecognized enzyme system lurking in the DNA of bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. The system has been named array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART. It consists of three components: a reverse transcriptase enzyme, an accessory protein whose function remains unknown, and a series of evenly spaced non-coding DNA repeats that look strikingly similar to CRISPR arrays. If that last part rings a bell, it should. CRISPR is the gene-editing technology that reshaped modern biology. How Claude found what humans missed The discovery wasn’t the product of a single chatbot session. Anthropic deployed approximately 950 Claude agents that ran autonomously for 21 hours, chewing through around 210 million tokens of genomic data in the process. Those agents screened more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases and flagged roughly 3,500 candidate systems worth a closer look. From that pool, they distilled the findings down to 20 specific systems deemed worthy of detail...