A discovery in 21 hours — who checks it?
Ten questions built from 18 records: what AI is said to have found, and who checks it and how.
Class quiz
Q1
According to Anthropic, how long did Claude agents take to scan DNA sequence databases and narrow down candidates for ART, a new enzyme system?
About 950 agents spent 21 hours scanning more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases and narrowed them to 20 candidates; Anthropic's own life-sciences team then characterized them experimentally. The preprint has not been peer-reviewed yet.
See the recordSep 23, 2026 · Claude agents find ART, an undescribed enzyme system, in bacteriophagesQ2
How did the price of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 compare with the model before it, Opus 5?
Opus 5.5 costs $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 for output, lower than Opus 5's $5 and $25. The update raised performance and cut unit prices at the same time.
See the recordSep 22, 2026 · Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5Q3
OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna on Sep 22. How do they relate to GPT-6 Astra?
Sol is the mid-range tier and Luna the entry-level tier, two steps below Astra. OpenAI announced prices 50% lower than the equivalent GPT-5.6 models.
See the recordSep 22, 2026 · OpenAI releases GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 LunaQ4
At the UN Security Council, which models did Sam Altman say should not be trained?
Altman said models should not be trained unless a very strong case can be made that they can be kept under human control. These were remarks, not a binding commitment.
See the recordSep 23, 2026 · Sam Altman addresses the UN Security CouncilQ5
At the same Security Council session, Yoshua Bengio said frontier AI systems should need a license, just like what?
Bengio proposed licensing frontier systems like medicine, aviation and nuclear power, with their safety demonstrated to independent experts before deployment.
See the recordSep 23, 2026 · Yoshua Bengio addresses the same UN Security Council sessionQ6
According to OpenAI, which ChatGPT plans show ads?
OpenAI said ads appear only on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro and Enterprise have none. With this expansion, ChatGPT Ads runs in more than 60 countries.
See the recordSep 23, 2026 · OpenAI expands ChatGPT Ads to six Southeast Asian countries and TaiwanQ7
What did NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and partners release through the AlphaFold Database?
They used AlphaFold2, sped up with NVIDIA BioNeMo, to predict protein-complex structures for more than 2,800 virus species; Seoul National University and Sungkyunkwan University took part. These are predictions — checking them by experiment is a separate step.
See the recordSep 24, 2026 · NVIDIA, DeepMind and EMBL-EBI release predicted structures for 2,800+ virusesQ8
Carnegie Mellon researchers tested AI world models on 'object permanence'. What does that mean?
Object permanence is understanding that an object still exists when it's hidden. The researchers built a dataset from 150 tasks drawn from cognitive science and evaluated 14 models.
See the recordSep 23, 2026 · CMU researchers publish a study on world models learning object permanenceQ9
In the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, how did using Claude change the time it took to write situation reports?
Automatically pulling case and test data scattered across slides cut report writing from a day to under 1 hour. The time savings are Anthropic's account.
See the recordSep 22, 2026 · Anthropic shares how Claude was used in the DR Congo Bundibugyo Ebola responseQ10
OpenAI claims an internal model solved more than 100 long-standing open math problems. Where does that claim stand, according to the record?
The claim, which includes the Navier–Stokes Millennium Problem, rests only on OpenAI's announcement for now, with no published proofs or peer review. The record is kept for follow-up checking.
See the recordSep 21, 2026 · OpenAI launches an advisory group on mathematics and AI