A biologist queries whether AI 'borrowed' his work to make major discovery—an expert explains the rules

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: AI company Anthropic recently announced that its popular system Claude had identified an unusual family of biological molecules. These molecules were enzymes, a type of protein that speeds up chemical reactions in living organisms.

The new group of enzymes was discovered in bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria. Anthropic named them array-associated reverse transcriptases (ARTs). The finding was presented as an example of AI initiating biological discovery.

However, a researcher studying the same enzymes then raised a question: Had Claude independently recognized their significance, or could unpublished work shared with the chatbot have influenced its result? Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a Ph.D. candidate in computational biology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, says his team members have been investigating these enzymes, which they call "jumbotrons," since 2022. According to The Scientist magazine, he shared his dissertation and manuscript drafts with Claude.

Anthropic denies that the model was trained on user transcripts or that its biology team had access to them. Mestre's concerns and Anthropic's response raise a question that the available reporting cannot independently resolve. There is no established evidence that his unpublished material was used in the discovery.

Mestre is named among the inventors of a patent for engineered "retrons", genetic systems that contain a reverse transcriptase enzyme and an associated RNA. The patent also lists reverse transcriptase sequences from jumbo phages, the type of virus involved in Anthropic's announcement. Its U.S. application was published in July 2023.

This documents earlier work on jumbo-phage reverse transcriptases. But alone it does not establish that the full system of enzymes described by Anthropic had already been characterized by Mestre's team. Reverse transcriptases are enzymes that copy RNA (a single-stranded molecule that's essential in most biological functions) into DNA (the double-stranded molecule carrying the instructions for life).