Dario Amodei’s Anthropic says its Claude AI model “autonomously discovered” a new enzyme system resembling the molecular machinery behind CRISPR gene editing, the first result to come out of the company’s newly launched wet lab.
\n\nAnthropic is framing the discovery as an early test of whether Claude can actually be useful to scientists, and the timing is notable: it comes as the company prepares to go public in a potential trillion-dollar IPO. Human involvement, Anthropic says, was limited to writing an initial prompt and running the physical lab work. The AI did the searching and analysis itself.
\n\nThe process started with a search through a massive database of DNA sequences. Nearly 950 Claude agents worked through the data over 21 hours, processing 210 million tokens. One of those agents noticed an unusual repeating pattern in the dataset and flagged it for human review. Further analysis and lab testing followed, revealing what Anthropic calls “a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages,” the viruses that infect bacteria.
\n\nWhat that enzyme system actually does is still unclear. Anthropic says it’s still working that out, and there’s no telling yet whether the discovery leads anywhere practical, let alone whether it could rival CRISPR’s…
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/
