Anthropic confirms wet biology lab

Anthropic revealed it operates a Bay Area biology lab where its AI models run physical experiments. The lab was established this spring.

Claude found new enzyme system

The lab announced Claude discovered a previously unknown enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA with properties similar to CRISPR gene-editing technology.

The enzyme cuts, copies, pastes DNA

The system behaves like CRISPR by performing operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria.

Claude did it in twenty-one hours

Anthropic says Claude found the discovery mostly on its own in just twenty-one hours, using about nine hundred fifty agents and two hundred ten million tokens.

Stanford team found something similar

CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged Stanford researchers previously discovered a system in some ways similar to Claude's find. The broader research community must validate the discovery.

Humans still run the experiments

All physical lab work is performed by human scientists. The Bay Area lab handles only lower biosafety risk levels and does not work with human pathogens.

“All of the lab work is performed by human scientists.”

Amodei sees future for autonomous labs

Amodei said Claude might eventually perform experiments autonomously with safeguards, but Anthropic is not doing that today. He fears AI could enable bioterrorism.

“Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren't doing that today.”

AI biology research is spreading

Stanford published work on LLMs and CRISPR. UC San Francisco used AI to design enzymes. Google launched AlphaFold in twenty twenty. AI has arrived across biological research.