On 23 September 2026, Anthropic announced that its model Claude had autonomously discovered a previously undescribed enzyme system in bacteriophage genomes.
The system was named ART — array-associated reverse transcriptases. It includes a reverse transcriptase, an adjacent gene of unknown function, and a long array of repetitive DNA sequences.
It is precisely this array of repetitive sequences that resembles the structure of CRISPR, although the function of ART remains unknown for now.
Claude analyzed enormous DNA databases using approximately 950 agents. One of them, within 21 hour of work, noticed an unusual pattern and flagged its similarity to CRISPR-like repeats.
The reverse transcriptase itself had appeared in previous studies, but it was Claude that first identified the full context of the system — the array and the partner gene.
The discovery became the first notable result of Anthropic's new biology laboratory, where AI is combined with wet-lab experiments.
The company's scientists emphasize: ART was found in viruses that infect bacteria, and its potential for gene editing or other applications has yet to be studied.
Whether such an approach can accelerate discoveries in biology, only time will tell, but it is already clear that AI is capable of finding patterns that elude the human eye when working with gigantic data sets.
