Anthropic’s discovery will, at best, be just another gene-editing tool — SkimNews
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- Anthropic announced on 23 September that its AI Claude discovered "a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats," which it calls array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), by searching a DNA database for reverse transcriptase enzymes.
- Claude agents identified roughly 200,000 sequences likely coding for reverse transcriptases, and one agent spotted repeated sequences next to the reverse transcriptase gene in bacteria-infecting viruses, prompting an output of "a CRISPR-like… repeat array?!"
- The discovery is comparable to the 1987 spotting of CRISPR repeats in E. coli by researchers in Japan (later named by Francisco Mojica at the University of Alicante), not the 2012 CRISPR-Cas9 breakthrough that earned Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley a Nobel prize.
- Gene editing already has multiple alternatives including bridge recombinases, base editors, and prime editors — and prime editors already fuse a reverse transcriptase with part of Cas9, so reverse transcriptases have already been adapted for RNA-targeted gene editing.
- In terms of AI contributions to biology, the article argues Claude's find is not close to DeepMind's AlphaFold protein-structure prediction system, which it calls truly transformative.
Why it matters: The article argues that CRISPR-style hype around Claude's viral-enzyme find obscures the gap between spotting interesting repeats (1987-level) and engineering a usable tool (2012-level), meaning at best one more gene-editing option joins an already crowded field of engineered Cas9 variants, base editors, and prime editors.
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