Anthropic Says Its A.I. Discovered a New Enzyme System That Resembles the Revolutionary Gene-Editing Tool CRISPR

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic claims that its A.I. Claude has taken a major step in the field of biology. It has autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system that resembles the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing technology CRISPR, according to a September 23 statement.

Researchers described the findings in a preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed. They can’t say whether it will be as useful as CRISPR, which has revolutionized research, such as by helping scientists create personalized medicines to treat genetic diseases. Nevertheless, the work represents a major advancement in A.I. autonomy, writes Dimitri Perrin, a computer scientist at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, in the Conversation.

Researchers instructed around 950 A.I. agents to search through a massive DNA database. They were on the hunt for “interesting new examples” of reverse transcriptases, enzymes that read a string of RNA and make a complementary DNA strand, per the statement. The A.I. could write its own code to do so and initially found about 200,000 of these enzymes.

After about 21 hours, one agent pinpointed something special: an unusual reverse transcriptase with a partner gene next to it and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Collectively, that’s called an array-associated reverse transcriptase, or ART. CRISPR has these components, too.

Claude was not the first to spot this particular reverse transcriptase, per the Conversation. Rather, it discovered that the enzyme was embedded in the ART. Humans then stepped in with lab work and determined that the A.I. agent had identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages, or bacteria-killing viruses.

The newfound ART’s encoded similarities to CRISPR provide a reason to be excited, per Anthropic. CRISPR was discovered because of its repeating DNA sequences in 1987 in the bacterium Escherichia coli. It helps the microbe fend off viruses.