Anthropic says its Claude AI helps discover new enzyme system:Identifies unusual combination of biological macromolecules hidden in DNA data

What if AI could scan billions of DNA sequences and spot something that human researchers had overlooked? Anthropic says its Claude AI has done just that, identifying a previously uncharacterised enzyme system in viruses that infect bacteria. The system, called array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), contains a pattern of repeated DNA sequences that resembles the arrays seen in CRISPR systems. However, researchers stress that ART is not known to be a gene-editing tool, and its actual biological function has not yet been established. This finding is one of the first results from Anthropic’s new life sciences research group and laboratory, established in 2026 to explore how AI agents could help scientists analyse biological data and develop new research ideas. What exactly did Claude discover? ART is found mainly in bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The system has three main parts: Researchers already knew the reverse transcriptase from earlier work. Anthropic says Claude appears to have been the first to identify the combination of the enzyme, the neighbouring gene and the unusual repeat pattern as a possible new biological system. Why does it look like CRISPR? The connection to CRISPR comes mainly from the repeated DNA pattern. CRISPR systems contain arrays of repeated DNA sequences that ultimately produce different RNA molecules. These RNA sequences help guide CRISPR machinery, making some CRISPR systems programmable for tasks such as targeting specific DNA sequences. Anthropic’s early experiments found that the ART repeat array is also produced as several short RNA molecules. This similarity is interesting, but researchers do not yet know whether ART performs a CRISPR-like function. How did Claude find it? Anthropic gave Claude a broad task: search a huge database of DNA sequences for unusual reverse transcriptases. The company says roughly 950 Claude agents worked for about 21 hours, processing around 210 million tokens during the search. They identified more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, produced about 3,500 candidate systems, and eventually narrowed them down to 20 candidates for closer examination. One Claude agent noticed an unusual repeat pattern next to a reverse transcriptase. It then examined the DNA sequence, counted and compared the repeats, checked other known systems and searched scientific literature before flagging the finding for human researchers. Scientists then investigated the candidate in the laboratory. What have scientists confirmed so far? Early laboratory experiments suggest that the DNA repeat array produces several distinct short RNA molecules. However, researchers are still trying to understand what these RNAs do and how the complete ART system works. The research has been released as a preprint, meaning it has not yet gone through the full peer-review process. Anthropic also makes clear that the discovery does not mean ART can currently edit genes or replace CRISPR. Humans still played an important role Although Anthropic describes Claude as carrying out much of the computational discovery work, human scientists were still involved. Researchers selected the broad research question, reviewed the AI-generated candidates, and conducted the laboratory experiments. Claude was mainly used to analyse DNA sequences, examine scientific literature, generate hypotheses, and help interpret experimental results. Anthropic says its laboratory currently works at BSL-1 and BSL-2 levels and does not handle pathogens that can infect humans.