Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big

An AI company announced that its biology lab, established this spring in the Bay Area, discovered a previously unknown enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA that can perform DNA operations similar to CRISPR, a gene-editing technology. The company's AI model found the discovery in about 21 hours using roughly 950 agents and 210 million tokens, though the company notes that a Stanford team previously discovered a similar system. The discovery matters because it demonstrates AI's emerging capability in biological research, though the broader research community will need to validate how significant and novel the finding actually is. The lab currently operates at lower biosafety risk levels with human scientists performing all physical experiments, though the company's leadership has indicated that fully autonomous AI-controlled experiments may be possible in the future.