Claude agents find ART, an undescribed enzyme system, in bacteriophages
Anthropic announced that Claude agents had found ART (array-associated reverse transcriptases), a previously undescribed enzyme system, in bacteriophages — a structure made up of a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene and repetitive DNA sequences resembling CRISPR arrays. About 950 agents used 210 million tokens over 21 hours to scan more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases in DNA sequence databases, narrowing them down to 3,500 and then to 20 candidates; Anthropic's own life-sciences research team in the Bay Area then characterized them experimentally. A technical preprint was released at the same time
Why it matters
A case of AI moving from summarizing the literature to "deciding for itself what to look at and noticing anomalous patterns first". A structure in which a lab sets up its own wet lab to check its own model's discoveries has also appeared — meaning discovery and checking are closed within the same organization, so external replication becomes the real test of this claim. It is a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed
Source — Primary sources first; secondary reports are labelled “Press”
Officialanthropic.comhttps://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-systemAdded in Week 40, 2026 · See that week