Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Anthropic announced its Bay Area wet biology lab discovered a new enzyme system with properties "reminiscent of CRISPR" hidden in bacteriophage DNA that can cut, copy, and paste DNA — work established this spring.
- Claude completed the search in 21 hours using roughly 950 agents that processed 210 million tokens, per CEO Dario Amodei's post on X.
- Amodei acknowledged a Stanford team previously discovered a system "in some ways similar" to what Claude identified.
- Anthropic stated all physical lab work is performed by human scientists, limited to BSL-1 and BSL-2 biosafety levels with no pathogens that infect humans.
- Amodei said Claude may "eventually" autonomously control lab equipment with safeguards, but emphasized Anthropic isn't doing that today.
- Stanford researchers are pairing LLMs with CRISPR work, UCSF scientists used AI to design enzymes from scratch, and Google launched its AI-powered biology tool AlphaFold back in 2020.
Why it matters: Anthropic is publicly positioning Claude as a functioning scientific researcher that compressed a discovery into 21 hours, yet is keeping humans in charge of physical experiments — a split that mirrors Amodei's own stated fears about AI-enabled bioterrorism sitting alongside his prediction that AI will "cure most diseases in 5-10 years."
Ask SkimNews
