Mad Scientists: Anthropic Claims Claude AI Has Discovered an Enzyme with Gene-Editing Potential

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.

Anthropic 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.

The 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.

What 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 impact. The company has called its own announcement “admittedly premature,” an unusually candid admission that arrives as Anthropic tries to pull more scientists into its lab and expand into new territory like drug discovery.

Breitbart News previously reported that unscrupulous Chinese scientists have claimed to edit the genetics of human babies in the womb using CRISPR:

According to He, the baby girls were genetically modified to make them highly resistant to HIV, which their father was infected with. Scientists around the world condemned his team for irresponsibly using CRISPR to edit human genes. He attempted to publish papers describing his work, but international scientific journals refused to accept them.

A third allegedly genetically edited child was born to another of the women in He’s trials. None of the three children has been identified to the public, so He’s claims have never been independently verifiable.

The Chinese government was clearly displeased as well, because He disappeared in December 2018, shortly after discussing his work at a conference in Hong Kong.

Asked why it publicized a finding whose significance is still uncertain, Anthropic said it is “important to share such findings early, both to demonstrate Claude’s capabilities and to give the broader community insight into what we’re working on.”