Anthropic researchers said Claude helped discover a previously unknown biological system hidden in a massive collection of DNA data – and human scientists later confirmed in the laboratory that the system exists, according to a company blog post.
Anthropic gave hundreds of Claude agents access to biological databases and asked them to search for potentially interesting enzymes, the tiny biological machines that perform specific jobs in living things.
During the search, one Claude agent noticed something unusual: instructions for an enzyme appeared next to a repeating pattern of DNA. That pattern was not what researchers had originally asked Claude to look for, but the agent flagged it as potentially important.
The discovery prompted Anthropic’s scientists to investigate further. Laboratory experiments confirmed that the unusual system is real and exists primarily in viruses that infect bacteria.
Researchers have named it array-associated reverse transcriptase, or ART.
Not so fast, Claude
But computational biologist Mario Rodriguez Mestre from the University of Copenhagen said he and his peers have been studying the enzymes and related molecules for four years, according to The New York Times.
Mestre and his team have not yet published their findings but they have been using Anthropic’s AI models in the last three years. They said they shared their key findings about enzymes with Anthropic’s models, the Times reported.
So Mestre wondered if Claude really did find the enzyme on its own or it was guided based on the Copenhagen team’s work.
“My concern is that this information was used to train future versions of the models,” Mestre told the paper. “I think it’s important to raise this possibility.”
Anthropic told the Times in a statement that it was “not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system we recently found. Claude was also not trained on any user transcripts, and our molecular biology team has no such access, either.”
Claude’s key finding was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system, according to the paper. Mestre said he and his team found that out more than a year ago.
What is ART?
Scientists don’t yet know what ART does. They also haven’t shown that it can edit genes or be used to develop medicines or other commercial products. The research is preliminary and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
What makes the finding notable is how it was discovered. Claude searched biological data far too large for scientists to examine manually, noticed an unusual, repeating pattern and generated a lead that human researchers could test in the laboratory.
Anthropic said 949 Claude sessions worked for about 21 hours during the initial search, examining data drawn from billions of groups of proteins.
The research provides an early example of AI doing more than summarizing existing scientific knowledge. In this case, Claude identified something scientists apparently had not previously recognized and gave researchers a new biological system to investigate.