Anthropic and Adaptyv Bio Launch AI Protein Design Contest With $1M in Credits

Anthropic and Adaptyv Bio have co-launched a protein design competition that will experimentally validate over 5,000 AI-generated designs across five selected challenges. Participants can access up to $1 million in Claude credits, $250,000 in Modal compute credits, and experimental validation funding through Adaptyv Bio, with DNA supplied by Twist Bioscience. The competition builds on a prior collaboration in which Claude-assisted design campaigns yielded a reported 26.8% hit rate across 1,320 designs tested in Adaptyv Bio's automated wet lab. A key feature of the program is its end-to-end loop connecting computational protein design directly to physical laboratory testing, aiming to close the gap between AI predictions and real-world outcomes. Optimized biology models developed through the initiative will also be released as open source, potentially lowering barriers for research teams working on complex protein engineering problems.