Anthropic's Claude has discovered a previously uncharacterised enzyme system hidden in bacteriophage DNA, after AI agents searched more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases and spotted an unusual genetic pattern resembling CRISPR.
The system, named array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), could potentially represent a new programmable biological mechanism. But scientists do not yet know exactly what it does, whether it can edit DNA or whether it will have any practical medical use.
