In September 23, 2026, the company Anthropic announced that its model Claude had helped discover a previously unknown enzyme system in the DNA of bacteriophages.
The system was named ART — array-associated reverse transcriptases. It includes a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring partner gene, and a long array of repeating DNA sequences.
These repeats resemble CRISPR structures, although the function of ART is not yet clear. Scientists at Anthropic confirmed part of the finding in the laboratory.
Claude worked almost autonomously. About 950 agents of the model spent 21 hour and 210 million tokens analyzing DNA databases.
Human involvement was limited to the initial request and the subsequent laboratory verification. This is the first result of Anthropic's new biological laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The company emphasizes that the base enzyme had already appeared in previous studies, but it was Claude that noticed the key features of the entire system.
The discovery has not yet undergone peer review, and its significance remains to be assessed by the scientific community. How far can AI go in the search for new biological mechanisms?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei noted that the finding is based on the work of other researchers, but emphasized the model's contribution to identifying the details.
