Anthropic says Claude has identified a previously undescribed enzyme system in the DNA of bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, after roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours and 210 million tokens combing genomic data. The company calls it array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, and published a preprint alongside the announcement on Wednesday. It is the first result from the Bay Area biology lab Anthropic opened this spring.
According to Anthropic, the agents gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, narrowed them to about 3,500 new candidates and then to 20 finalists. ART has three parts: a reverse transcriptase enzyme, an accessory gene beside it, and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats that resembles the arrays found in CRISPR. Initial experiments showed the array is expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs, which caught attention because CRISPR’s RNAs are what make it programmable. The reverse transcriptase itself had already been noted in jumbo phages.
Human scientists did all the bench work, while Claude searched the data, proposed hypotheses and helped interpret results. The lab works only at biosafety levels one and two and handles no human pathogens. As TechCrunch noted, Stanford researchers had previously described a system that is in some ways similar, and groups at UCSF and Google are applying AI to comparable searches.
What Anthropic has not claimed is a function. It says ART has not been shown to work like CRISPR, that its biological role is unknown and that further experiments are under way, and the preprint has not been peer reviewed. For now the discovery is a pattern and some RNA, and it falls to the wider research community to decide how new, and how useful, it really is.
