For years, we’ve been asking whether artificial intelligence can write like us, draw like us, code like us, or eventually replace us. Anthropic just gave us a more interesting question: Can AI notice something in nature that human scientists have been staring past?
On Wednesday, Anthropic announced that its Claude AI had identified what researchers believe is a previously unrecognized biological system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The system contains a reverse transcriptase, a nearby partner gene, and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Anthropic calls it ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases.
From Anthropic:
Today, we’re sharing early results from one of our first research programs, in which Claude autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system that is associated with an array of DNA repeats, a pattern reminiscent of CRISPR. Although we don’t yet know its function, the system that Claude discovered has a set of characteristics that have only ever been found together in a handful of other systems, all of which are programmable and perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA. Beyond CRISPR, which has already transformed science and medicine, several other such systems are now in development as promising tools.
The system that Claude found is based on a reverse transcriptase (RT), enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. While this underlying RT, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in previous studies, Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features—an associated array of non-coding DNA sequences and an additional accessory protein of unknown function.
The enzyme itself wasn’t unknown. Scientists had already catalogued the reverse transcriptase. What humans apparently missed was the larger pattern surrounding it. Claude noticed that these pieces occurred together and that the repeating DNA looked strangely organized.
