Last week, Anthropic confirmed that it was operating a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its AI models to run physical experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that this lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a new enzyme “system” that has certain “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” as Anthropic describes it. CRISPR is a natural immune system used by bacteria to fight off viruses that has become a gene-editing technology widely used by researchers.
Essentially, what Anthropic says it found is a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. Anthropic’s researchers say this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can “perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.” It will be up to the broader research community to validate how big, or new, this discovery actually is. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledges that the discovery was based on the work of others and that a team from Stanford previously discovered a system “that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found,” he wrote on X.
But Amodei and Anthropic are not just emphasizing the discovery. They are touting it was found “mostly, though not entirely, by Claude,” the CEO wrote. On the one hand, that is astounding.
This lab was only established this spring (though Anthropic declined to be more specific about how many months it has been open). A discovery in just a few short months would be speedy enough work, but the team said it actually only took Claude 21 hours of concerted effort. Claude searched through data using about 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens.
Still, the revelation that Anthropic has been conducting biology experiments comes right after AI CEOs, including Amodei, publicly admitted that models have become so capable, and so potentially dangerous, that the industry must slow down and develop safety-testing procedures. This after a couple of his employees publicly said earlier this month that there’s a risk AI could kill us all. Amodei himself has said one of the things he fears most is that AI could be used for bioterrorism.
But he also believes AI will “cure most diseases in 5-10 years,” he wrote. So Anthropic has clearly decided the rewards are worth the risks. Given that, perhaps the biggest reveal in this news isn’t the discovery itself, but that the biology lab hasn’t let Claude loose.
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