Anthropic said Wednesday that its Claude AI agents flagged an uncharacterized enzyme system hidden in viral DNA after a 21.5-hour search involving about 950 worker agents and roughly 210 million tokens. The system, named array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, was found in bacteriophages next to a repeating DNA sequence that resembles a CRISPR array.
According to the preprint, the campaign began with a brief to hunt through 1.9 billion protein clusters for new reverse transcriptase systems. The agents amassed around 200,000 enzyme clusters, scored 3,564 candidate partner families, and produced 19 reports for human review. ART emerged almost by accident when one agent noticed a repeat pattern "by eye" while reading raw DNA near a peculiar enzyme.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the find as a "molecular machine" that could "represent a new gene editing mechanism," but also acknowledged that its "precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear." CRISPR co-inventor Feng Zhang reviewed the preprint and called the discovery "genuinely intriguing," adding that it merits further investigation.
Notably, Anthropic repeated the same campaign ten more times and all reruns missed the array, highlighting both the promise and fragility of the AI discovery process. The company said experiments to determine what ART actually does are already underway and it is inviting external scientists to propose research. Shares of gene-editing companies including CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, and Beam Therapeutics dipped on the news, though Anthropic stressed that the work was done at biosafety levels 1 and 2, does not handle pathogens that infect humans, and leaves all bench work to human scientists.
