Anthropic: Claude autonomously finds Crispr-like enzyme — SkimNews
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- Anthropic says Claude "autonomously discovered" a new enzyme system similar to the machinery behind Crispr, the first major result from its newly launched wet lab and an early test of Claude's usefulness for science.
- Nearly 950 Claude agents worked for 21 hours and consumed 210 million tokens before one spotted an unusual repeating pattern in a massive DNA sequence database and flagged it for human review.
- Further analysis and lab testing revealed "a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages," viruses that infect bacteria, with Anthropic noting scientists' involvement was limited to the initial prompt and lab work.
- Anthropic acknowledged it remains unclear whether the discovery has any practical applications, let alone transformative ones, but said it wanted to share findings early to demonstrate Claude's capabilities.
- The announcement comes as Anthropic seeks to attract more scientists to its lab and expand into drug discovery, part of a broader push by AI companies to prove the value of their more capable models.
- OpenAI, by contrast, has been barreling through increasingly advanced mathematical problems with little regard for academic norms, underscoring the competitive race among AI labs to demonstrate scientific utility.
Why it matters: Anthropic is using this preliminary discovery to validate both Claude's scientific capabilities and its newly launched wet lab, aiming to attract researchers and justify expansion into drug discovery at a time when AI companies face pressure to show tangible returns from expensive models. The admittedly premature framing prioritizes narrative momentum over scientific caution.
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