{"id":782184,"date":"2026-09-25T13:08:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T13:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/782184\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T13:08:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T13:08:19","slug":"anthropic-says-claude-has-found-something-potentially-transformative-in-our-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/782184\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic says Claude has found something potentially transformative in our bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Anthropic<\/a> says that its Claude<\/a> artificial intelligence system has found something potentially transformative in the human body.<\/p>\n

The company has found a \u201cpreviously unknown enzyme system\u201d inside DNA<\/a> that that it likened to CRISPR<\/a>, a biotechnology tool that has revolutionised biological research and the discovery of which won the Nobel prize in 2020. But it also warned that it will \u201ctake much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use\u201d.<\/p>\n

The announcement of the discovery also marked the company\u2019s first public acknowledgement of a biological lab that it has opened in California. That allows Anthropic to allow Claude to generate biological hypotheses and then test them in real life.<\/p>\n

Anthropic says that it will allow it to test the use of artificial intelligence in biological research. But it has also further added to fears about the potential dangers of AI<\/a>, many of which relate to its potential use to create biological weapons.<\/p>\n

The company stressed that its research \u201cinvolves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level\u201d and that it does not \u201chandle pathogens that can infect humans\u201d. \u201cEventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren\u2019t doing that today,\u201d said Dario Amodei, Anthropic\u2019s chief executive.<\/p>\n

For now, much of the lab\u2019s work involves setting Claude to search through DNA sequences that are associated with proteins whose function scientists don\u2019t understand. Claude reads the scientific work on the topic, writes a report on it for the humans that run the experiments, and then evaluates the evidence, dismissing most candidates.<\/p>\n

If something survives this review process, researchers then test it in Anthropic\u2019s lab, examining the protein so that it can be characterised, which also uses Claude. Scientists can then try and understand if that protein might be useful for further scientific research.<\/p>\n

Now, that process has led to its first public announcement. Mr Amodei said that it had turned up \u201ca molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIts precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many researchers pointed out that the company had only announced that it had made a potentially interesting discovery, and that further work would be required to understand if it was actually useful. Feng Zhang, one of the researchers who pioneered CRISPR, said for instance in a quotation shared by Anthropic only that it was an \u201cintriguing\u201d finding and that further work was required.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery,\u201d he said. \u201cThe identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":782185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-782184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}