Anthropic says Claude helped find a CRISPR-like enzyme system in phages

Anthropic says Claude helped identify a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages, the first result from its new wet lab in the Bay Area. The team calls it array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART): a reverse transcriptase gene, a partner gene beside it, and a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. The array resembles CRISPR but sits in loci that lack cas genes.

The numbers: roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours and 210 million tokens searching DNA data before one flagged the repeat pattern. Of 17 candidates promoted for deep dives, three held up as previously unreported RT associations, according to Drug Discovery News. In follow-up work, 28 of 95 RT clusters identified in jumbo phages and predicted viral genomes carried a detectable upstream repeat array. In a reanalysis of published data, array-derived RNAs made up as much as 8% of phage RNAs 15 minutes after infection.

Context: Scientific American reports the prompt asked Claude to look for accessory proteins near RT genes, not for repeats. Claude found the array instead. All bench work was done by human scientists.

My take: what ART actually does is unknown, as Anthropic's head of life sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams and researcher Nicholas Perry told Scientific American. And Drug Discovery News reports that in ten reruns of the same campaign, agents sampled ART loci but missed the array every time. A result that appeared once, in a search aimed elsewhere, is a lead, not a method. Show me the eval, not the vibe.