Anthropic's wet lab: ~950 Claude agents spend 21 hours and 210M tokens to find novel CRISPR-like enzyme system
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-09-24
Per The Verge, Anthropic's newly launched wet lab produced its first discovery: nearly 950 Claude agents worked 21 hours and consumed 210 million tokens searching a massive DNA sequence database before one flagged an unusual repeating DNA pattern for human review.
- Follow-up analysis and wet-lab testing revealed a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages, sitting beside a long CRISPR-like array of repeats — a comparison Anthropic itself draws.
- Human scientists were involved only in the initial prompt and lab verification; what the system does remains unknown, though the few known systems sharing its features can all cut, copy, and paste DNA.
- Anthropic says it shared early to demonstrate Claude's science capabilities and give the community insight into its work ahead of its IPO.
Practical applicability is still unclear.
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