Anthropic opens a biology lab, and roughly 950 Claude agents found a CRISPR-like reverse transcriptase system in phage DNA

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Anthropic announced a life-sciences research group with its own wet lab. Its first result is an 'array-associated reverse transcriptase' (ART) system in jumbo phages that Claude agents found after 21 hours, about 950 agents and 210 million tokens, with humans writing only the first prompt and doing the lab work. Feng Zhang called the RT-repeat arrays 'genuinely intriguing'. Critics quoted in AINews say the wet-lab validation is thin and mostly shows the system can be expressed. Its function is still unknown, so for builders this is a data point on how long agent swarms can run and what that compute costs, not a biology breakthrough yet.