Bacteriophages - GoKawiil

Anthropic says its Claude AI helped identify a new CRISPR-like enzyme system

Anthropic announced that its in-house wet biology lab, using its Claude AI model, identified a previously unknown enzyme system found in bacteriophage DNA that can cut, copy and paste DNA similarly to CRISPR. CEO Dario Amodei said the work took Claude about 21 hours using roughly 950 agents and 210 million tokens, and credited the discovery mostly, though not entirely, to the AI, while noting it builds on prior research including a similar Stanford finding.

techcrunch.com · 2026-09-23

Anthropic says Claude AI found a novel enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA

Anthropic reported that its Claude AI agents autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages after scanning a large DNA sequence database. The company said nearly 950 Claude agents ran for 21 hours, processing 210 million tokens, before flagging an unusual repeating pattern that human researchers then confirmed through lab testing. Anthropic likened the finding's underlying mechanism to that behind Crispr, though it says the enzyme's function is still being studied.

theverge.com · 2026-09-23