Claude finds a CRISPR-like enzyme system

Anthropic says Claude agents found a previously uncharacterized, CRISPR-like enzyme system after 21 hours, using roughly 950 agents and 210 million tokens. In its research announcement, Anthropic says agents screened 200,000 reverse transcriptases, narrowed 3,500 candidates to 20, then humans tested the array-associated reverse transcriptase (ART) in the lab; its function remains unknown. Scientists considering agentic research should treat this as a high-throughput hypothesis-generation pattern, not autonomous discovery—the earlier $4-an-hour safety-researcher economics matter only when human review and wet-lab validation stay in the loop.