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 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
MIT Technology Review's newsletters explore how AI tools could be misused to create bioweapons, citing a 2022 study where an AI drug-discovery model generated 40,000 potentially toxic molecules in under six hours. The coverage also notes that advances in gene editing and synthetic biology have made biotech more accessible, even as safeguards remain imperfect.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-09-18
MIT Technology Review's 2026 list of young innovators highlights Laureen Meroueh, founder of Hertha Metals, who has developed a furnace that converts iron ore directly into refined liquid steel in one step using natural gas instead of coal. The list also spotlights biotech researchers working on vision-restoring gene therapies, brain electrodes, and AI-designed viruses.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-09-11
Two children died in separate Chinese gene-editing trials — a boy in a 2025 trial by HuidaGene Therapeutics and a six-year-old girl in March 2024 after treatment developed by researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Xinhua Hospital. Shanghai Jiao Tong University has launched an investigation into the girl's case and a related study published in Nature, while HuidaGene disclosed the boy's death publicly in August.
nature.com
· 2026-09-08
Two children reportedly died after receiving gene-editing treatments in separate investigator-initiated trials (IITs) in China, drawing scrutiny to the country's rapid trial pathway. The deaths surfaced just months after Beijing introduced Order 818, a rule effective May 1 that tightens oversight of IITs, including restricting stem-cell and gene therapy trials to top-tier sanjia hospitals.
nature.com
· 2026-09-08
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