Anthropic Launches Life Sciences Lab as Claude Discovers Novel Enzyme System

Anthropic announced the launch of a life sciences research team and an in-house wet lab, revealing that a multi-agent system of roughly 950 Claude instances autonomously discovered a novel enzyme system named Array-associated Reverse Transcriptases (ART). Over 21 hours and 210 million tokens, Claude narrowed down over 200,000 candidate reverse transcriptases to 20 top candidates for laboratory validation by human scientists. This milestone highlights the potential of multi-agent AI architectures to accelerate scientific discovery, compressing genome-mining tasks that typically take human researchers weeks or months into less than a day. It signals a major shift as AI labs expand into physical research infrastructure to validate LLM-generated biological hypotheses directly. The discovered ART system comprises a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring chaperone gene, and a non-coding DNA repeat array structurally similar to CRISPR arrays, containing 3 to 21 short repeat copies. Anthropic emphasized that the lab only handles Biosafety Level 1 and 2 (BSL-1/BSL-2) materials with human scientists performing all physical wet-lab tests, while Claude handles data mining, hypothesis generation, and analytical reports.