Anthropic Says It Discovered a Crispr-Like System. Now What?

Tech executives have long touted the potential for their AI models to accelerate the pace of biology discoveries. Last week, they announced one. In a September 23 announcement, Anthropic claimed that its large language model Claude had identified an enzyme system with properties “reminiscent of Crispr,” the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool.

According to Anthropic, about 950 Claude agents running simultaneously found the interesting genetic sequences in 21.5 hours. “I sincerely compliment Anthropic for telling the world about their discovery,” says Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert at the University of California, Berkeley and director for therapeutic R&D at its Innovative Genomics Institute. (IGI is collaborating with Anthropic, but was not involved with the new discovery.)

Other scientists are less enthusiastic about the finding, which is the first to come out of a research group formed by Anthropic earlier this year. “The experiments are still in the queue. The PR is already live,” says Le Cong, a professor at Stanford University focused on integrating AI into genome engineering research.

Anthropic, which has set up a wet lab for drug discovery, has been clear that the finding isn’t the end of its work. (“We don’t yet understand what this system does,” the company said in an X post, “but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA.”) One physical experiment was included in a technical report, which has not been peer-reviewed. However, a lot more needs to be done to determine the significance of this discovery. It remains unknown whether this enzyme system can be used as a gene-editing tool and, if so, whether it’s a useful gene-editing tool.

“Let's say we are on Santa Monica Beach and trying to scan through all the sand to find a diamond,” Cong says. “AI found this thing that looks very shiny, and then you have to go back to the lab to know—is it glass? Is it a diamond?”