Anthropic confirmed last week that it operates a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where its AI models help run physical experiments. This week, the company announced that the lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. Anthropic says the system has properties reminiscent of CRISPR, the bacterial immune system widely used for gene editing, and can perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.

The discovery was made mostly, though not entirely, by Claude, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The team says Claude searched through data using about 950 agents and burned through 210 million tokens in 21 hours of concerted effort. Amodei acknowledged that the work built on others’ findings, noting that a Stanford team previously discovered a system that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found. The broader research community will need to validate how big or new the discovery actually is.

The lab was established only this spring, making a discovery in a few short months unusually fast. Still, Anthropic emphasized that Claude has not been let loose in the physical lab. All lab work is performed by human scientists, and the research involves only lower biosafety risk levels, BSL-1 and BSL-2, with no handling of pathogens that can infect humans. Amodei said it may eventually be possible for Claude to safely perform experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment with appropriate safeguards, but that is not happening today.

The news arrives just after AI CEOs, including Amodei, publicly admitted that models have become so capable and potentially dangerous that the industry must slow down and develop safety-testing procedures. Amodei has said one of his biggest fears is AI being used for bioterrorism, but he also believes AI will cure most diseases in 5-10 years. Anthropic has clearly decided the rewards are worth the risks.

AI-powered biological research is not unique to Anthropic. Stanford researchers recently published work on LLMs and CRISPR, UC San Francisco researchers used AI to design enzymes from scratch, and Google launched AlphaFold in 2020. The broader implication is that AI has arrived in biological research well beyond the AI labs pursuing it themselves.