What happened in this Tech story?

Anthropic's Bay Area biology lab used Claude to discover a previously unknown enzyme system with CRISPR-like properties hidden in bacteriophage DNA — a finding CEO Dario Amodei calls a notable early win for the lab opened earlier this year.

What is a key fact in this story? (1)

**Anthropic** announced its Bay Area wet biology lab discovered a new enzyme system with "properties reminiscent of CRISPR," hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages that infect bacteria.

What is a key fact in this story? (2)

**Claude** completed the discovery in about 21 hours of concerted effort using roughly 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens, even though the lab only opened this spring.

📎 SkimNews has covered Anthropic 399+ times · see the file →

Anthropic's Claude Finds CRISPR-Like Enzyme in Days — SkimNews

By TechCrunch · Summarized & edited by Kapil Samant · 2026-09-23

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Anthropic announced its Bay Area wet biology lab discovered a new enzyme system with "properties reminiscent of CRISPR," hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages that infect bacteria.
Claude completed the discovery in about 21 hours of concerted effort using roughly 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens, even though the lab only opened this spring.
CEO Dario Amodei said the discovery was "mostly, though not entirely" made by Claude, and acknowledged that a Stanford team had previously identified a system "in some ways similar."
Anthropic's lab uses only human scientists for physical experiments, operates at BSL-1 and BSL-2 safety levels, and explicitly does not handle pathogens capable of infecting humans.
Amodei said it may "eventually" be possible for Claude to autonomously run lab equipment "with appropriate safeguards," but stressed that is not happening today.
AI-driven biology isn't exclusive to Anthropic — Stanford researchers are working with LLMs and CRISPR, UCSF used AI to design enzymes from scratch, and Google launched AlphaFold back in 2020.

Why it matters: Anthropic opened the lab earlier this year and already produced a discovery it considers meaningful — but every physical experiment was performed by human scientists, not Claude, despite Amodei's public belief that AI could one day "cure most diseases in 5-10 years." The timing cuts against the CEO's own recent calls for AI safety slowdowns and his stated fears about bioterrorism, making this a real-world test of whether Anthropic can accelerate biology research while staying inside the BSL-1 and BSL-2 guardrails it has voluntarily imposed.