Anthropic says its Claude AI model has helped identify a previously uncharacterised biological system in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria.
The company said the system, named array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), has DNA repeats resembling those found in CRISPR, though its function remains unknown.
The finding was announced on September 23 alongside Anthropic’s new biology research group and laboratory. The work is described in a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Anthropic said roughly 950 Claude agents searched DNA data for reverse transcriptases over 21 hours, processing about 210 million tokens.
One agent identified an unusual reverse transcriptase alongside a long array of repeated DNA sequences. Researchers then analysed and tested the candidate in the laboratory.
ART consists of a reverse transcriptase, a neighbouring partner gene and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. Early laboratory results indicate that the repeats are expressed as distinct short RNA molecules, a feature that could be relevant to how the system functions.
MIT and Broad Institute scientist Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR research, described the finding as intriguing and said it deserved further investigation.
Anthropic stressed that additional experiments are needed to determine whether ART has any programmable gene-editing potential.
