🤖 Anthropic's AI agents find CRISPR-like system in viruses
About 950 agents based on Claude scanned a database of ~1.9 billion protein clusters in 21.5 hours and 215.6 million tokens and found a previously unknown ART system in bacteriophage DNA: reverse transcriptase, a partner gene, and a large repeat array similar to CRISPR. The function is not established, the preprint is not peer-reviewed, and the finding was not reproduced in 10 repeats.
🌍 Agentic search in genomic databases has shown for the first time that it can produce testable hypotheses for the "wet" laboratory, not just parse texts, — although non-reproducibility currently makes the method unreliable.
👤 All physical experiments are performed by humans in BSL-1/BSL-2 laboratories; Feng Zhang called the finding "truly intriguing," and Anthropic is calling on external groups to study ART.
Source 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03039-6 Source 2: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/23/anthropic-says-its-biology-lab-has-already-found-something-big/