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Anthropic announced that its Bay Area biology laboratory has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system, hidden in bacteriophage DNA, that can perform cut, copy and paste operations on DNA like CRISPR. CEO Dario Amodei said the discovery was mainly made by Claude, which called about 950 agents, consumed 210 million tokens, and took only 21 hours; he also acknowledged that the discovery was based on others' work, and that a Stanford team had previously discovered a similar system. Anthropic stressed that the laboratory only conducts BSL-1 and BSL-2 level research and does not handle pathogens capable of infecting humans, and that all experiments were carried out by human scientists. Subsequent reports said that Claude agents found in a viral DNA database a previously unseen system bearing CRISPR-like repeat sequences, named ART; Amodei said the work was "mostly but not entirely" done by Claude, with scientists responsible for choosing research directions and conducting experiments, and that the system's specific function remains unclear; he believes it may be a new type of gene-editing tool.
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The Download: Climate Tech Companies List and AI's "Discovery" ControversyDevelopments
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Sep 29
MIT Tech Review
The Download: Climate Tech Companies List and AI's "Discovery" Controversy
MIT Technology Review has announced its 2026 Climate Tech Companies to Watch list, selecting 10 companies advancing emissions reduction or public health in areas such as energy storage, nuclear power, and transportation; the full content will be published on October 6. Last week, Anthropic said that an AI agent in its molecular biology lab had for the first time discovered a previously unrecorded pattern related to an enzyme, a path compared to the discovery of CRISPR, but some biologists question whether this counts as a discovery and say their teams had already found the same pattern.
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