Anthropic's New Biology Lab Says Claude Found an Unknown CRISPR-Like Enzyme System

Anthropic has introduced a life sciences research group and a laboratory in the Bay Area, and reported that Claude agents autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system, the company said in an announcement on September 23, 2026. Anthropic calls the system array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART.

This is Anthropic’s own announcement about its own work, so the claims below are the company’s. It has released a preprint for other scientists to examine.

How the search worked

According to Anthropic, its scientists gave Claude a prompt to search a large database of DNA sequences for interesting new examples of reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. The company said its involvement was limited to that initial prompt and the lab work. About 950 agents spent 21 hours on the search and used 210 million tokens before one of them flagged a repeating pattern of DNA sequences next to the gene for an unusual reverse transcriptase.

Anthropic said the agents gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, picked out 3,500 new candidate systems and narrowed those to 20 for detailed, human-readable reports. Human scientists then tested the leading candidate in the lab and confirmed that the pattern marked a new system.

Why CRISPR comes up

The flagged pattern was a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats, a layout reminiscent of CRISPR, the bacterial system that became the foundation of modern gene editing. Anthropic said ART is found mainly in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, and has three parts: the reverse transcriptase, a partner gene beside it, and the repeat array. Its first experiments suggest the array is expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs.

The company was explicit about the limits. Anthropic said it does not yet know what the system does, and that work to understand its primary function is ongoing. It said the underlying enzyme had been identified in earlier studies, but that Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features.

MIT and Broad Institute professor Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR genome editing, reviewed the preprint and called the finding “genuinely intriguing” and worth further investigation, according to Anthropic.

About the lab

Anthropic said the lab works only at the lower biosafety levels, BSL-1 and BSL-2, does not handle pathogens that can infect humans, and that all lab work is performed by human scientists.

What it means

The result is an early example of AI agents doing the search-and-flag part of biological discovery at scale, with people handling the experiments. It follows Anthropic’s claim a week earlier that Claude now leads a quarter of its R&D; see our report on that disclosure. The next test is whether independent researchers can reproduce the finding and whether follow-up work shows what ART actually does.