AI company Anthropic announced that its Claude model has autonomously discovered a new enzyme system in bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The discovery is the first result from the company's new life sciences research group and its physical biolab, which was established in the spring of 2026 to accelerate biological discovery.
The newly identified system, named array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), has structural similarities to the DNA repeat arrays found in CRISPR gene-editing technology. The discovery was made after approximately 950 Claude agents analyzed a massive DNA database for 21 hours. Human scientists provided the initial direction and then conducted lab experiments to verify the AI's findings.