Anthropic Claude Discovery Draws Biologist Ire — SkimNews
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- Anthropic launched a molecular biology lab earlier this year where Claude agents read and conjecture about biology problems while human scientists run experiments, announcing the system had made its first discovery.
- Anthropic said its 950 Claude agents identified an uncatalogued repeating pattern surrounding a known enzyme after 21 hours, comparing it to the gene pattern that led to CRISPR.
- Lucas Harrington, whose viral critique of Anthropic's announcement was endorsed by Eli Lilly's chair and CEO, argued that finding gene clusters is the easy part and that real discoveries come from figuring out what biological systems actually do.
- Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a University of Copenhagen biologist who regularly used Claude in his work, told the New York Times his team had already documented the pattern; Mestre said he is stopping all use of Claude after Anthropic denied learning from his conversations.
- OpenAI said earlier this month its team agents cracked a million-dollar math problem, but mathematicians later questioned whether it was a problem the field values most and alleged the models may have used one mathematician's work without credit.
Why it matters: Anthropic and OpenAI are positioning their models as scientific discoverers, not tools — but when biologists can point to prior work and skeptics reframe a math 'breakthrough' as uninteresting, the strategy makes the public more skeptical of genuine AI-driven progress when it does occur.
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