Anthropic’s Claude Identifies a CRISPR-Like Enzyme System, but Scientists Urge Caution

AI and biological discovery Technology company executives have long touted the potential of artificial intelligence models to accelerate biological research. Last week, Anthropic announced that its large-scale language model, Claude, had identified an enzyme system with properties “reminiscent of CRISPR,” the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool.

Anthropic announced the discovery on September 23. According to the company, about 950 Claude agents ran simultaneously and identified an interesting genetic sequence in 21.5 hours.

“We sincerely commend Anthropic for sharing their discovery with the world,” said Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert and director of therapeutic research and development at the Institute for Innovative Genomics at the University of California, Berkeley. The IGI collaborates with Anthropic but was not involved in this new discovery.

Other scientists are less enthusiastic about the finding, which was first published by a research group founded by Anthropic earlier this year. “Experiments are still pending. PR is already happening,” says Le Cong, a Stanford University professor who studies the integration of AI into genome-engineering research.

What Anthropic’s AI discovered

Anthropic has set up a wet lab focused on drug discovery, a field in which identifying a biological candidate is only the beginning. “We don’t yet understand what this system does,” the company says.

In a post on X, Anthropic said that only a handful of known systems share the relevant functionality, and that these systems can cut, copy and paste DNA.

The finding was described in a technical report that has not been peer-reviewed. More research is needed to determine the significance of the discovery. It also remains unclear whether the enzyme system can be used as a gene-editing tool and, if so, whether it would be useful for gene editing.

“Let’s say we’re on Santa Monica Beach and we’re combing the sand trying to find diamonds,” Cong says. “The AI has discovered this object that looks very shiny. Then we have to go back to the lab to find out: Is it glass or diamond?”

How Claude found the enzyme system

Claude identified the sequence after Anthropic researchers prompted it to search extensive genomic databases for “interesting new examples” of reverse transcriptase, a protein that copies RNA into DNA. This is the opposite of the usual process in human cells, where DNA is transcribed into RNA, but reverse transcriptases are used by other organisms for biological functions such as inserting DNA segments.

According to Anthropic, Claude initially identified more than 200,000 potential reverse transcriptases. It selected several thousand that appeared to be new, then narrowed the search further and identified an “unusual” family of reverse transcriptases containing long regions of repetitive DNA sequences similar to those found in CRISPR.

Anthropic calls the system ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptase. The system is found in jumbo phages, which are large viruses that infect bacteria.

Why scientists are comparing ART with CRISPR

“I can see the tandem repeat sequence… Is that a CRISPR-like repeat sequence?” the AI agent wrote. The agent also acknowledged that the system could be a retron, as noted in the technical report.

Both CRISPR and retrons are bacterial immune systems. Although retrons have some potential utility in gene editing, they are not the same kind of multipurpose tool as CRISPR. That distinction is why some scientists view Anthropic’s CRISPR comparison cautiously.

Seth Shipman, an associate research scientist at the Gladstone Institutes, said he does not believe Anthropic has discovered a new CRISPR system. Still, he considers the finding interesting.

“What’s novel is not what it is, but how they found it,” Shipman says. His lab uses retrons to create gene-editing systems, suggesting that retrons could potentially be useful in this context.