Anthropic’s Claude helps spot new phage enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

The discovery of the ART enzyme system highlights Claude’s emerging role in real-world biological research, even as its function remains unclear.

Updated 25 September 2026

Anthropic has launched a Bay Area wet lab where its Claude model helps drive molecular biology research, and its first major result is the identification of a previously uncharacterized enzyme system in bacteriophages. Using about 950 Claude agents over 21 hours and 210 million tokens, the system scanned large DNA datasets to flag an unusual reverse transcriptase linked to a DNA repeat array and an accessory protein, a pattern Anthropic says resembles CRISPR-like programmable DNA tools. The team has named these “array-associated reverse transcriptases” (ART) and has posted a preprint, while external experts like CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang say the work merits further investigation. Anthropic stresses that human scientists still perform all physical lab work under BSL-1 and BSL-2 constraints, and that the function and practical utility of ART remain unknown. The company is positioning this as both an early validation of Claude for scientific discovery and a way to attract more researchers as it expands into life sciences and drug discovery.