Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has revealed that its AI models helped identify a previously unknown enzyme system with properties similar to the gene-editing technology CRISPR.
The discovery was made at Anthropic’s wet biology laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the company uses its AI models to conduct and analyse physical biological experiments.
According to Anthropic, the enzyme system was found in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect and replicate inside bacteria. Researchers said the system can perform operations including cutting, copying and pasting DNA, giving it some similarities to CRISPR.
CRISPR is a natural bacterial defence mechanism against viruses that has been adapted by scientists into a widely used gene-editing technology.
Anthropic said the discovery was made largely by Claude, its artificial intelligence model, in what the company described as an early demonstration of AI agents conducting scientific research with limited human intervention.
The company said Claude used about 950 AI agents to search through scientific data, processing approximately 210 million tokens during 21 hours of concentrated work.
The development comes only months after Anthropic established its wet biology laboratory, highlighting the company’s growing efforts to combine AI systems with physical scientific research.
However, the significance and novelty of the enzyme system will need to be independently assessed by the wider scientific community.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged that the discovery builds on existing research, noting that a Stanford team had previously identified a system that was similar in some respects to the one identified by Claude.
The development underscores the expanding role of AI in scientific research, as technology companies increasingly seek to deploy AI agents capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks beyond conventional software-based applications.
