THE CRUNCH
Anthropic says its AI Claude has autonomously discovered a new enzyme system similar to the machinery behind the powerful gene-editing tool Crispr. The company claims this is the first result from its newly launched wet lab and an early test of Claude’s usefulness for science as Anthropic prepares to go public. Anthropic reports that Claude found the enzyme system after searching through a massive database of DNA, a
process that involved nearly 950 Claude agents working for over 21 hours to process 210 million tokens. The company states that scientists were involved only in the initial prompt and lab work, with the AI doing the heavy lifting of pattern recognition. This discovery highlights the potential for large language models to assist in scientific research, though the practical applications of the enzyme system remain to be seen.
Anthropic’s wet lab is a physical space where AI models can test their ideas in the real world, a step beyond the digital-only approach of many AI companies. The fact that Claude found a pattern in DNA sequences suggests that AI might be able to identify biological structures that are difficult for humans to spot. This could be a significant step forward in the field of synthetic biology, but it is still early days.