Exin Therapeutics Says AI Agent Performed Brain Surgery Injection on a Mouse

Biotech startup Exin Therapeutics claimed this week that it successfully had an AI agent perform brain surgery on a mouse. The team used the Anthropic Sonnet model, providing it with a spreadsheet containing 19 gene therapy vectors, an epileptic mouse model, and a camera-equipped robotic arm setup. The model autonomously selected the drug and brain region, derived coordinates from three papers, and drove the robotic arm to inject 250 nanoliters of the drug, while using the camera to observe whether the injection site was bleeding; the craniotomy and suturing were performed by human doctors. The company had originally preferred Anthropic Opus 5.5, but that model refused to execute after detecting biology-related content, citing concerns that being cut off mid-surgery would endanger the animal.