Anthropic ran 950 AI agents for 21 hours. They found a new enzyme system.
Anthropic opened a molecular biology lab in the spring and put Claude to work hunting unusual proteins, a field its scientists have spent careers studying.
The company set 950 Claude agents, copies of its AI model, to search public DNA data at once. In 21 hours, Anthropic says, they collected more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA back into DNA, and flagged 3,500 new candidate systems. The team analysed the 20 it found most compelling.
Anthropic says one of them is new. It calls it an array-associated reverse transcriptase: an enzyme paired with a partner gene and repeating stretches of DNA, the same kind of pattern found in CRISPR, the gene-editing system. The company says it does not yet know what the system does. Work to find out is ongoing.
Feng Zhang, the MIT professor who pioneered CRISPR editing, called the finding "genuinely intriguing" and said it "merits further investigation".
3,500 candidates went in; 20 came out for analysis. The checking still runs at human speed.
🎥 Video: Anthropic, official YouTube channel, 23 Sep 2026 · narration: AI voice
How many candidate ideas could your team actually check in a week?
What the captions say
- Anthropic opened a biology lab this spring.
- Its scientists hunt for unusual proteins in nature.
- Claude now searches the DNA data for them.
- 950 copies of Claude ran for 21 hours.
- They pulled over 200,000 of one protein family.
- Claude flagged 3,500 candidates. Twenty were analysed.
- One enzyme system was new, Anthropic says.
- Its function is still unknown.
