Anthropic announced that its artificial intelligence system, Claude, has discovered something that could revolutionize our understanding of the human body.
The company found a "previously unknown enzyme system" within DNA, and likened it to CRISPR technology, which revolutionized biological research and whose discovery won the Nobel Prize in 2020.
But the company warned at the same time that knowing how this system works, and whether it can be used in the same way, will require "much more work".
This announcement also represents the company's first public acknowledgment of a biological laboratory it opened in California, which allows "Cloud" to put forward biological hypotheses and then test them in the field.
The company says this will help it test the use of artificial intelligence in biological research. However, it also raises concerns about the risks of AI, particularly its potential use in creating biological weapons.
The company stressed that its research "is limited to the lowest levels of biosafety risk" and that it does not "deal with pathogens that can infect humans."
Dario Amode, CEO of Anthropic, said: "It may eventually become possible for Claude himself to safely conduct experiments via self-control of laboratory equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we are not doing that today."
Currently, the lab often tasks Claude with investigating DNA sequences associated with proteins whose function is unknown to scientists. Claude reads the scientific research on the topic, writes a report for the researchers running the experiments, then evaluates the evidence and eliminates most of the candidates.
If a candidate successfully passes this review, researchers at the Anthropic Laboratory test it and examine the protein for characterization, using the Cloud protein as well. Experts then try to determine if this protein is useful for further scientific research.
This process has now led to the company's first public announcement. Amodi stated that they have uncovered "a molecular machine that we believe may represent a new mechanism for gene editing."
He added: “Its precise function, its usefulness in biotechnology (if any), or its overall significance are not yet clear, but at the very least, it’s work I would have been proud to have accomplished as a PhD student.” He continued: “The work was mostly, if not entirely, done by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read the literature and a range of genome data, discovered something interesting, and then proposed experiments to verify the discovery, which our team carried out.”
However, many researchers pointed out that the company had only announced a potentially interesting discovery, and that further work was needed to determine its actual usefulness. Feng Zhang, a pioneer in CRISPR technology, was quoted by Anthropic as saying the discovery was "curious" and warranted further investigation.
He added: "This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery," noting that "the identification of RNA replication arrays associated with reverse transcriptase enzymes is truly intriguing and deserves further investigation."
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