Anthropic says its Claude models have discovered a new enzyme system that carries CRISPR-like repeats, a finding the company ties to a life sciences research group it launched this spring. The system has been named array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, and it turns up mainly in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. A pre-print describing the work has been released.
The discovery came from a single prompt. Anthropic says it asked Claude to search a DNA database for reverse transcriptases, and the agents ran for 21 hours, using roughly 950 agents and consuming 210 million tokens. They gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, picked out 3,500 new candidate systems, and narrowed the list to 20 of the most compelling candidates. Anthropic says the same analysis can take human experts weeks to months.
The work was done in Claude Science and Claude Code, and in some cases a custom harness coordinated parallel sessions. Human involvement was limited to the initial prompt and the laboratory work, which was performed entirely by human scientists. The lab is in the Bay Area and operates only at BSL-1 and BSL-2, and Anthropic says no human pathogens are handled there.
ART has three parts: a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene, and a repeat array. What it actually does remains unknown. The underlying reverse transcriptase in a jumbo phage had been identified before, but Anthropic says Claude may be the first to flag those defining traits, which include a non-coding DNA array and an accessory protein. One Claude agent put it this way: "[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!"
Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer and a professor at MIT and the Broad Institute, reviewed the pre-print. "This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation. I hope this work encourages more scientists to explore how AI can support their research."
The finding lands in a field built on similar accidents of observation. Restriction enzymes were found in bacterial immune systems, Taq polymerase was identified in a bacterium from Yellowstone hot springs, and CRISPR itself was first noticed as an unusual bacterial repeat sequence. Other programmable systems are also in development as tools.
The research group sits within Anthropic's wider life sciences organization, which also includes drug discovery teams and work on teaching Claude biology and chemistry. The announcement gives no price and no commercial availability date for anything arising from the work.
