Anthropic Launches AI-Assisted Wet Lab and Reports CRISPR-Like Enzyme Discovery

Summary

Anthropic has launched a human-staffed molecular biology laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area after operating it quietly since the spring. The company says the lab uses Claude upstream of wet-lab work: AI agents examine DNA sequences associated with poorly understood proteins, narrow the candidates, and pass them to human scientists for testing. Anthropic says its first project focused on reverse transcriptase enzymes, which can write RNA into DNA. A day-long search involving 950 AI agents examined a database and produced more than 200,000 candidate reverse transcriptases; the system then selected 20 promising candidates. One previously characterized enzyme was found to contain an unnoticed tandem repeat array, a pattern associated with the cut-and-paste activity of CRISPR-like systems. Anthropic’s scientists call the reported system array-associated RTs, or ART. Its biological function is not yet clear, and the companion technical report has not been peer-reviewed. CRISPR researcher Feng Zhang described the finding as intriguing and worthy of further investigation. Anthropic says the lab may study difficult-to-treat conditions but will not focus exclusively on drug research and will not run clinical trials. Although unnamed sources described a possible future in which Claude directs robotic laboratory units, Anthropic says real laboratory work remains essential for now. The discovery involved six named human scientists and used 210 million tokens, underscoring both the scale of the AI-assisted workflow and the resource requirements of the approach.