Anthropic on September 23, 2026 unveiled the first major finding from its in-house biology lab: Claude, running as a swarm of autonomous agents, appears to have identified a new class of CRISPR-like enzyme systems hiding in bacteriophage DNA.
950 Agents, 21 Hours, 200,000 Enzymes
The system, dubbed Array-Associated Reverse Transcriptases (ART), emerged from a computational campaign in which roughly 950 Claude agents ran in parallel for 21 hours, chewing through 210 million tokens as they combed a database of more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases. Claude flagged 3,500 candidate systems, then narrowed the list to 20 particularly compelling hits before spotting the tandem-repeat arrays that look strikingly like the guide-RNA scaffolds of CRISPR.
An Endorsement From The Godfather Of CRISPR
MIT and Broad Institute researcher Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR, praised the work: "This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery." One agent's own log captures the moment of pattern recognition: "[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!"
From Chatbot To Autonomous Scientist
The result is Anthropic's clearest public evidence that frontier LLMs can now do open-ended scientific search rather than merely summarize known knowledge. It also lands the same week Anthropic quietly rolled out Claude Opus 5.5 and disclosed that Claude now leads 26% of its own R&D work. Anthropic says the ART system now needs wet-lab validation, but has published a technical preprint alongside the announcement.
Reporting based on Anthropic, TechCrunch, Unite.AI and Interesting Engineering.