Anthropic Says Its AI Helped Discover a Possible New Gene-Editing Tool

Anthropic said that Claude helped discover a previously unknown molecular system that the company said could represent a new gene editing tool akin to CRISPR, which has transformed the creation of new gene therapies.

In a post on X, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cautioned that the “precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance” of Claude’s discovery isn’t yet clear. But he heralded it as a promising sign of possible future medical breakthroughs by AI. “It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years,” he wrote.

The discovery was the first notable achievement of a new biotech research group that Anthropic formed in the spring. Amodei said that the milestone was the result of a collaboration between Claude and the company’s life sciences team, who suggested a broad area of research for the AI. Claude then scoured medical literature and genome data and proposed experiments for the Anthropic scientists to carry out to verify the AI’s findings.