An AI went digging in the genome — and struck a CRISPR-shaped surprise

Researchers at Anthropic turned their AI, Claude, loose on a giant database of DNA with one instruction: find something interesting. After about 21 hours of autonomous searching — with the AI writing its own code to do it — one agent spotted a strange enzyme sitting beside a long stretch of repeating DNA, a pattern called an array-associated reverse transcriptase. It has never been described before, and it carries the same repeating-DNA signature that led scientists to CRISPR decades ago. Honest caveats: the work is still a preprint, and nobody yet knows what this enzyme does. But outside experts say the real milestone is the method — AI conducting the kind of open-ended biological exploration humans barely have time for.