Anthropic Claude agents discover novel bacteriophage enzyme system ART

Anthropic reported that Claude agents autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system, array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), featuring a reverse transcriptase paired with CRISPR-like DNA repeats and an accessory protein in bacteriophage genomes. Roughly 950 agents processed over 210 million tokens across 21 hours to surface candidates later reviewed in Anthropic’s Bay Area wet lab. This marks an early concrete instance of frontier models contributing novel biological hypothesis generation at scale under human laboratory follow-up.