Last week, Anthropo confirmed which was operating a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its artificial intelligence models to perform physics experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that this lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a new enzyme “system” that has certain “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” such as Anthropo describes it.
CRISPR is a natural immune system used by bacteria to fight viruses that have become a gene editing technology widely used by researchers.
Essentially, what Anthropic says it has found is a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and replicate inside bacteria. Anthropic researchers say this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can “perform operations such as cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.”
It will be up to the broader research community to validate how big or new this discovery really is. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledges that the discovery was based on the work of others and that a Stanford team previously discovered a system “that in some ways is similar to what Claude found,” he said. wrote in X.
But Amodei and Anthropic don’t just emphasize discovery. They are touting that it was found “mostly, though not entirely, by Claude,” the CEO wrote.
On the one hand, this is amazing. This lab was only established this spring (although Anthropic declined to be more specific about how many months it has been open). A discovery in just a few months would be pretty quick work, but the team said it actually only took Claude 21 hours of concerted effort. Claude searched for data using around 950 agents who burned 210 million tokens.
Still, the revelation that Anthropic has been conducting biological experiments comes just after AI CEOs, including Amodei, publicly admitted that the models have become so capable, and so potentially dangerous, that the industry must slow down and develop safety testing procedures. This after a couple of his employees said publicly earlier this month that There is a risk that AI could kill us all.
Amodei himself has said that one of the things he fears most is that AI could be used for bioterrorism. But he also believes that AI “will cure most diseases within 5 to 10 years,” he wrote. So Anthropic has clearly decided that the rewards are worth the risks.
Given that, perhaps the biggest revelation of this news is not the discovery itself, but that the biology lab has not let Claude loose. The physical experiments were performed by humans.
“Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We conduct research that involves only the lowest levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All lab work is performed by human scientists.”
It’s also true that AI-powered biological research is not unique to Anthropic. Stanford researchers I just published an article about the work they are doing with LLM and CRISPR. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco used AI to design enzymes from scratch. Google launched its first AI-powered biology research tool, AlphaFold. back in 2020. So AI has clearly reached biological research beyond the AI labs that do it themselves.
However, Amodei has not ruled out a fully automated biology laboratory in the future. “Over time, it might even be possible for Claude himself to safely conduct the experiments by autonomously controlling the laboratory equipment, with appropriate safeguards, but we are not doing that today,” he said.
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