Anthropic announced last week that AI agents in its biology lab had discovered new enzymes with gene editing potential, but a scientist who says he identified the same molecules years earlier is disputing the claim.
\n\nThe New York Times reports that Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes for four years, well before Anthropic’s announcement. Anthropic calls the enzymes and related molecules “ARTs,” short for array-associated reverse transcriptases, and says its AI system took “the first steps of a biological discovery on its own.”
\n\nBreitbart News previously reported on the supposed AI-powered discovery:
\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.
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/
