{"id":640093,"date":"2026-09-30T01:34:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T01:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/640093\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T01:34:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T01:34:22","slug":"did-anthropics-artificial-intelligence-really-make-a-scientific-discovery-on-its-own-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/640093\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Anthropic\u2019s artificial intelligence really make a scientific discovery on its own? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Anthropic<\/a>, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used AI<\/a> agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.<\/p>\n

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodr\u00edguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said last weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules \u2013 which Anthropic calls ARTs \u2013 for four years.<\/p>\n

Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic\u2019s AI models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.<\/p>\n

In doing so, Mestre said he and his colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, for me, the most important question is not \u2018Were ARTs already known?\u2019 They were,\u201d Mestre said in an interview. The issue instead, he added, is whether Anthropic\u2019s AI actually reasoned its way to the results, or whether it was guided to them based partly on his own work.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy concern is that this information was used to train future versions of the models,\u201d Mestre said of his own research. \u201cI think it\u2019s important to raise this possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement on Sunday, Anthropic said: \u201cWe are not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system we recently found. Claude was also not trained on any user transcripts, and our molecular biology team has no such access, either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic said that Claude\u2019s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Maestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery more than a year ago.<\/p>\n

Similar worries surfaced recently when researchers at OpenAI claimed to have solved a long-standing mathematics puzzle. A leading mathematician noted that he had been using the company\u2019s AI to work toward a solution for some time.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Are global controls needed for AI? The United States doesn\u2019t think soOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Anthropic, which is expected to go public at a valuation potentially as high as $2 trillion, has touted biological research as a central part of its mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe this type of application will accelerate rapidly in the years ahead, and that we can make profound progress in the near future on diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia,\u201d Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said in a speech to the United Nations on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\"DarioDario Amodei, a co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, delivers remarks by video at a UN Security Council last week. Photograph: Dave Sanders\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

In their report last week, Anthropic researchers said they instructed AI agents to search databases containing billions of gene sequences. The scientists did not describe the precise prompts they had used.<\/p>\n

The databases contain DNA collected from the ocean, soil and other habitats. The genes belong mostly to microbes and viruses; scientists have only determined what a fraction of them do.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s scientists tasked the AI with finding genes that direct production of enzymes called reverse transcriptases. These enzymes read the sequence of an RNA molecule and make a matching DNA molecule with the same sequence.<\/p>\n

Bacteria use some reverse transcriptases to sense invading viruses. Some viruses rely on reverse transcriptases as weapons against other viruses.<\/p>\n

The Anthropic scientists provided the AI with five examples of reverse transcriptases. The agents wrote their own software to explore the databases for similar genes and to look closely at promising candidates.<\/p>\n

The agents identified genes for possible reverse transcriptases in bacteria-infecting viruses known as jumbo phages. Each of those sequences was located close to an array of genes for RNA molecules, which may help the enzymes carry out their jobs.<\/p>\n

The Anthropic scientists named the enzymes array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ARTs. In a report posted to their website, they said that their AI had taken \u201cthe first steps of a biological discovery on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Sunday, Mestre disputed that claim. \u201cThey are the same systems we have been studying for years,\u201d he said. And they are the same enzymes, he said, that he had described to Anthropic\u2019s AI.<\/p>\n

Mestre first encountered the enzymes in jumbo phages in 2022 while searching for new reverse transcriptases. He worked briefly as a consultant for ReNegade Therapeutics, which filed a patent in 2023 on a number of reverse transcriptases, including the ones Mestre found. He is listed as a co-inventor on the patent filing.<\/p>\n

After working for ReNegade, Mestre joined the University of Copenhagen to study reverse transcriptases in more detail, including the ones he found in jumbo phages. He and his colleagues nicknamed them \u201cjumbotrons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic released Claude in 2023, a year after Mestre began researching jumbotrons. Like many scientists, he found it useful for an assortment of tasks.<\/p>\n

\"Anthropic’sAnthropic\u2019s logo on a podium at their Code W\/ Claude event in San Francisco, California. Photograph; Jason Henry\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

\u201cI completely switched my way of doing science,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

During his conversations with Claude, Mestre shared a draft of both his dissertation and of a manuscript describing jumbotrons. He and his colleagues uploaded additional details while using Claude to perform various administrative tasks.<\/p>\n

The New York Times reviewed Slack messages, figures and other materials produced by Mestre documenting his research and his conversations with Claude over the past several years. They seem to show that the AI was extensively involved in his research.<\/p>\n

Seth Shipman, a bioengineer at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, said that he was familiar with Mestre\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been talking with him about these for years,\u201d he said. \u201cMany of us know about these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mestre said he could not be sure that Anthropic had relied on his work to seek out jumbotrons. But he was sceptical, he said, that the AI agents could have managed to find them so swiftly.<\/p>\n

Jumbotrons are rare, and their RNA genes are difficult to distinguish from random genetic sequences. Mestre also found some striking overlap between his work and the work presented by the Anthropic scientists.<\/p>\n

The scientists claimed that their AI had independently retrieved the raw data from a 2022 experiment in which researchers recorded all the viral RNA molecules produced by a microbe infected by jumbo phages.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s AI reported that the microbes created high levels of the RNA molecules in ARTs. The scientists argue that this evidence supports their hypothesis that the reverse transcriptases they claim to have discovered rely on these RNA molecules to carry out a job for the jumbo phages.<\/p>\n

Mestre said that he and his colleagues analysed the same data a year ago, which helped them identify the RNA genes associated with the jumbotrons. They shared this unpublished information with Claude.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe resemblance was striking to us,\u201d Mestre said.<\/p>\n

Without a closer look at what the Anthropic AI actually did, Mestre said that it would be impossible to say for sure that it was guided by his research.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, coincidences happen,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone in the field is doing more or less the same things. But we were aware of these repeats more than one year ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mestre had become increasingly enthusiastic about using AI for his science. Just last month, he began using Claude Science, a new Anthropic AI tool tailored to researchers.<\/p>\n

But after Anthropic\u2019s announcement last week, he is winding down his projects with Claude and shifting to other models.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m shutting down everything,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-640093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}