Anthropic · AI-Assisted Discovery

Array-Associated Reverse Transcriptases

Anthropic reports that Claude agents identified a novel enzyme system, a reverse transcriptase (previously known from jumbo phages) paired with a partner gene and an array of evenly spaced DNA repeats resembling CRISPR arrays, a combination Anthropic says had not been noticed together before. Roughly 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours and 210 million tokens scanning over 200,000 reverse transcriptases across DNA sequence databases, narrowing 3,500 candidate systems to 20, before one agent flagged the tandem repeat pattern. Human lab work has since confirmed the array is expressed as distinct short RNAs, but Anthropic states plainly it does not yet know the function, and this is an early finding shared alongside a preprint rather than a peer-reviewed, function-characterised discovery.