Overview
- Anthropic deployed roughly 950 Claude agents in an automated search that ran about 21 hours and used roughly 210 million tokens to narrow hundreds of thousands of reverse transcriptases to a small set of candidates.
- The company calls the system array associated reverse transcriptases, or ART, and says it pairs a reverse transcriptase with an accessory gene plus long, evenly spaced DNA repeats similar to those that make CRISPR arrays programmable.
- Researchers in Anthropic’s Bay Area BSL-1/2 lab tested a lead candidate and detected distinct short RNAs produced from the ART repeat arrays, but the team has not shown what biological role the system plays.
- Anthropic posted a preprint describing the AI-led discovery, emphasized that human scientists performed all physical experiments, and said further functional experiments and validation are underway.
- The work builds on prior findings of related enzymes and highlights how general AI can speed genomic analysis, yet independent replication and peer review are needed before ART can be considered a new programmable tool for genome engineering.