Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big

Last week, Anthropic confirmed that it was operating a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its AI models to run physical experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that this lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a new enzyme “system” that has certain “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” as Anthropic describes it.

CRISPR is a natural immune system used by bacteria to fight off viruses that has become a gene-editing technology widely used by researchers.

Essentially, what Anthropic says it found is a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. Anthropic’s researchers say this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can “perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.”

It will be up to the broader research community to validate how big, or new, this discovery...

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