Claude locates an enzymatic system in bacteriophage DNA that has never been described, called ART

Anthropic announces that a 21:30 autonomous agent campaign isolated a trio of reverse transcriptase + partner gene + network of regular repetitions evoking a CRISPR locus.

Anthropic has made public the first result of its life sciences research group, set up in the spring of 2026: by searching a database of about 1.9 billion protein clusters on his own, Claude got his hands on a molecular assembly that has never been characterized before, present in the genome of bacteriophages — viruses that attack bacteria.

The system, called array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), brings together three elements: a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene located right next to it, and a long series of DNA repeats spaced out on a regular basis. It is this last signature that has caught the attention: the architecture is reminiscent of a CRISPR network, which stores the RNA guide bank that makes CRISPR systems programmable.

The campaign lasted 21.5 hours, mobilized 949 agent sessions and consumed 215.6 million tokens, bringing back some 200,000 enzyme clusters that were then reduced to 3,564 families of candidate partners. Anthropic says it does not yet know what ART is for, says it is continuing experiments, and invites other teams to submit research proposals. The lab, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, operates at biosafety levels 1 and 2, does not handle any human pathogens, and all manipulations are conducted by human scientists.