Anthropic's Claude AI system has helped spot a previously unknown biological system in the DNA of viruses that infect bacteria, the first discovery from the company's new life sciences lab.

The system, dubbed array-associated reverse transcriptase or ART, combines a known reverse-transcriptase enzyme with a partner gene and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Its architecture echoes CRISPR, the bacterial defence system behind modern gene editing. Its actual function, however, is still unknown.

Anthropic said about 950 Claude-powered agents searched DNA databases for roughly 21 hours, processing some 210 million tokens, against a database of nearly 1.9 billion protein sequences. They surfaced more than 200,000 candidate genes and narrowed the field to 20 worth close study. Lab tests confirmed the finding; results are preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed.

CEO Dario Amodei told the UN Security Council the system "may constitute a new gene editing mechanism." For now, it is CRISPR-like in structure, not yet proven in function.