Claude AI Identifies Novel Enzyme System in Bacteriophage DNA Called ART

Anthropic's biology research lab announced on September 23 that its Claude AI identified a previously undescribed enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA, dubbed array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ART. Around 950 Claude agents processed over 210 million tokens across 21 hours, systematically narrowing more than 200,000 reverse transcriptase candidates down to 20 before flagging an unusual repeating DNA pattern for human review. The discovery is not of a new molecule but of a novel relationship between already-known components — a reverse transcriptase, a neighboring gene, and a repeat array — functioning together as a single system. ART structurally resembles CRISPR arrays and may be programmable for DNA operations, though Anthropic acknowledges its function remains unknown. The findings exist only as a preprint pending peer review, and all physical laboratory experiments were conducted by human scientists.