Anthropic AI Agents Discover Viral DNA Sequences That Resemble CRISPR Systems

Artificial intelligence can analyze petabytes of data. But how well can it pipette?

Anthropic has launched a biology “wet lab” where human scientists and AI agents work together to plan and conduct experiments. This week, the artificial intelligence company announced one of the team’s first discoveries: unusual DNA patterns in the genomes of several giant viruses.

The patterns resemble DNA sequences found in the CRISPR immune systems of some microorganisms. Scientists have developed these microbial systems into powerful genome-editing tools. However, researchers at Anthropic in San Francisco, California, have not yet determined what the newly discovered viral sequences do or whether their function is similar to that of related sequences in microbial CRISPR systems.

AI agents search genomic data for “strange things”

The discovery offers a first glimpse at Anthropic’s new life-sciences research group and its affiliated laboratories, where AI tools are being used to mine petabytes of genomic data for potential molecular tools.

The company announced the laboratory and released a preprint on September 23. The study was posted online on the alphaXiv platform and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Many of the most impactful discoveries in biology come from “finding weird things” in microorganisms, says Eric Kauderer-Abrams, director of life sciences at Anthropic. “Our goal was to see if we could systematize and scale up such research.”

The first experiment involved approximately 950 AI agents. These autonomous systems often rely on large language models (LLMs). Anthropic’s agents spent more than 21 hours exploring billions of proteins autonomously, discussing preliminary results and deciding on next steps.

In mathematics, AI continues to generate solutions to long-standing problems, raising questions about the future role of human experts. But Kauderer-Abrams says that human contributions to biology will remain clear for the foreseeable future because life-science research requires experiments in the physical world. “Biology is difficult,” he says.

How the AI agents found repeated viral DNA sequences

Anthropic researchers first instructed an AI agent to explore a database containing billions of protein-coding DNA sequences. The agents searched for proteins that might work in conjunction with an enzyme called reverse transcriptase.

While examining DNA surrounding the reverse-transcriptase gene of a giant virus, the agents found the same short sequence of DNA letters repeated several times. Investigators decided the finding was worth examining and later identified similar patterns in the genomes of other viruses.

The repetitive DNA sequences resemble those found in CRISPR systems. A bacterial CRISPR system may contain multiple repeated sections of DNA separated by segments copied from viruses and other invaders. When an invader arrives, RNA produced from those DNA segments activates partner enzymes that cut the invader’s DNA, breaking its genome into small pieces.

Viral DNA function remains unknown

There is currently scant evidence that the repeats discovered by Anthropic’s AI agents perform similar functions. Researchers also have not identified DNA-cutting enzymes that partner with the repeats.

“This is a promising lead,” Kauderer-Abrams says. “The challenge is fully characterizing it, understanding its functionality, and developing it into interesting tools.”