Anthropic touts Claude's ART enzyme find; CRISPR researcher says routine genome mining

Anthropic is not presenting the ART finding as a standalone paper but as one of the first discoveries from its Bay Area biology lab, which opened in spring 2026. The company says Claude did most of the analysis on its own, while humans set the research question and ran the lab experiments — a division of labor that places AI on the hypothesis-generating side of biology, not the bench.

The technical claim rests on scale: about 950 AI agents spent 21 hours combing through more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases. Next to one unusual enzyme, they found repeating DNA sequences. That is the signature of genome mining, a search method that Mammoth Biosciences, co-founded by Lucas Harrington, already uses to hunt for CRISPR systems.

Harrington's pushback is not that the search failed, but that finding a system is only the first step. The hard part is figuring out what a system actually does, and Anthropic has not shown that, he wrote on X. Whether ART becomes a meaningful result may hinge on whether Anthropic or others can demonstrate a function, rather than on how much of the search the AI ran.