The Pulse
Anthropic Says Claude Found a CRISPR-Like Enzyme System
Anthropic says Claude agents identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA after a 21-hour search of reverse transcriptases. The company calls the system array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, but says
AI.info Team ·
Anthropic says Claude agents have identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA, finding a pattern of repeated sequences beside a reverse transcriptase gene during a 21-hour search. The company is calling the system array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, and says its function has not yet been determined.
The announcement on September 23, 2026, introduces Anthropic’s new life sciences research group and laboratory alongside the early result. The company says Claude received high-level direction from scientists, searched DNA databases, generated candidate reports and helped interpret experimental data, while human researchers carried out the laboratory work.
Anthropic’s account of the research describes ART as a system found mainly in bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria. Its resemblance to CRISPR comes from a long array of evenly spaced DNA repeats that, in initial experiments, is also expressed as a set of distinct short RNAs.
Claude’s 21-hour search produced 20 leading candidates
Anthropic began with a prompt asking Claude to search a large DNA database for interesting examples of reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. The company says roughly 950 agents worked for 21 hours and used 210 million tokens.
The agents gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, selected 3,500 candidate systems for closer review and narrowed those to 20 leading candidates. Anthropic says an expert scientist would typically spend weeks or months conducting comparable genomic analysis.
One agent then examined an unusual reverse transcriptase family in greater detail. While reading the raw DNA around the gene, it identified what Anthropic describes as a tandem repeat array and compared the sequence layout with known reverse transcriptase systems and prior literature.
“This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation. I hope this work encourages more scientists to explore how AI can support their research.”
Feng Zhang, professor at MIT and the Broad Institute
ART resembles CRISPR without being CRISPR
The underlying reverse transcriptase had already been identified in a jumbo phage, according to Anthropic. The company says Claude appears to have been the first to connect it with the system’s defining combination of an associated non-coding DNA repeat array and an additional accessory protein whose function is not known.
ART consists of three reported components: the reverse transcriptase, a neighboring partner gene and the long array of repeated DNA sequences. That arrangement differs from the CRISPR systems used in gene-editing tools, but the repeat structure prompted the comparison.
CRISPR arrays contain collections of RNA sequences that help make CRISPR-Cas systems programmable. Anthropic says ART’s array is likewise transcribed into short RNAs, raising the possibility that the RNAs participate in the system’s activity. The company has not established what those RNAs do.
The laboratory has tested the pattern, not its final purpose
Anthropic says researchers followed the computational work with laboratory experiments and recognized the sequence pattern as a previously uncharacterized enzyme system. Further experiments are underway to determine ART’s primary function.
The company says its Bay Area laboratory works at biosafety levels 1 and 2 and does not handle pathogens capable of infecting humans. Human scientists perform the laboratory experiments, including protein expression and biochemical and structural characterization, while Claude helps analyze the results.
That division of labor matters to the claim being made. Anthropic describes Claude as identifying an unusual genomic arrangement, proposing it as a candidate system and helping guide analysis; the company does not say the model independently established ART’s function or produced a working gene-editing tool.
Anthropic is building a biology workflow around Claude
The ART project is part of a broader research program Anthropic formed in spring 2026 to test whether general-purpose AI models can assist with fundamental biology. The group searches protein families, examines genomic neighbors, proposes possible functions and filters large numbers of hypotheses before human scientists decide which candidates merit experiments.
Anthropic says most candidate reports are rejected during follow-up analysis. When a candidate survives review, researchers express the protein in standard laboratory strains and characterize it experimentally, with Claude assisting in the interpretation of the data.
The company has released a technical report alongside its announcement. For now, the concrete result is a newly described arrangement of a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring gene and repeated DNA sequences—not a demonstrated CRISPR replacement or an established biotechnology application.