950 Claude Agents Discover Novel ART Enzyme System in 21 Hours
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-09-24
Anthropic's molecular biology lab has published its first result: Claude autonomously discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system, ART (Array-associated Reverse Transcriptases), given only a high-level research direction. ART features CRISPR-like repeated DNA arrays, a reverse transcriptase, and a companion gene of unknown function, and may represent a new biological mechanism.
About 950 Claude agents ran in parallel for 21 hours, consuming 210 million tokens to filter over 200,000 reverse transcriptases down to 3,500 candidates and then 20 for deep analysis—work that would take human experts weeks or months. Claude spotted the regular repeats, connected them to CRISPR, checked the literature, and submitted the system for human review. Lab work confirmed the DNA arrays express multiple short RNAs, showing real biological activity.
Unlike tool-stage AI such as AlphaFold, Claude made exploratory research decisions end to end. Anthropic says it is training Claude's "scientific taste" using researcher feedback to judge which hypotheses merit experiments. Dario Amodei called it a first step toward "curing most diseases" within 5-10 years.
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