Thank you for sharing, that provided some good context for how to interpret this

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I wish we didn’t need these again, but here is the honest version of Anthropic’s biology announcement (Caveat: I haven’t worked in bioinformatics for many years.) The good: Anthropic ran ~950 Claude agents over a large biological sequence database. Claude searched, wrote code, compared sequences and genomic neighborhoods, and found an interesting pattern that apparently had not been noticed before: a known reverse transcriptase associated with another gene and a repetitive DNA array.

That is cool. Automating this kind of open-ended bioinformatics search at scale is useful, and Claude may have found a lead a human would have missed.

But: Claude did not do a biological experiment. It searched databases and analyzed data.

Humans then took the candidate into the wet lab. And the wet-lab result so far is modest: they showed that the repeat array produces short RNAs.

We still don’t know what the system does. No function, mechanism, phenotype, targeting, defense activity, or programmability has been demonstrated.

This is also where the CRISPR framing gets ahead of the result. Right now, “it has some features reminiscent of known programmable systems” is a hypothesis for what to investigate next, not a discovery that it behaves like CRISPR.

And there is a missing baseline: bioinformatics has had tools for finding unusual gene neighborhoods and candidate systems for years. The interesting comparison is 950 Claude agents vs. an expert using the best existing computational pipelines - not Claude vs. someone manually looking through 200,000 sequences.

So my honest announcement would be:

Claude autonomously found an interesting candidate for a previously uncharacterized biological system. A small human wet-lab experiment confirmed that part of the candidate is expressed. We don’t yet know what it does.

That is a good result.

But in a regular biology lab, this isn’t the finished paper. It is the result you show at lab meeting and say: “This looks interesting. Now we need to figure out what the hell it does.”

Maybe that next step leads to a major discovery. But that discovery hasn’t happened yet.

It looks like the researchers just wrote the agentic harness and the rest of the work really was done autonomously by Claude with only extremely limited guidance after.

BTW the first author of the paper worked in the Doudna lab studying the origins of crispr (and after their PhD, joined Anthropic). All of the authors either have, or are going to have, excellent careers. I dont' think they are worried about attribution.

I'm more annoyed that they announce "CRISPR-like" to hit those SV Next Big Thing dopamine receptors but upon reading haven't done any laboratory work to determine if it has any useful applications like CRISPR-Cas9.

It's totally legitimate research worthy of publication, but Anthropic chose a hot technology in the popular imagination for a reason. Now I'm going to have to see "Claude invented a new CRISPR in 24 hours!" everywhere and trying to correct it will just turn into repetitive arguments about goalposts moving....

If it requires humans in the loop it throws cold water on the hopes of replacing millions of jobs, which is priced into their current valuation.

Because they’re trying to pump their stock price before their economic walls come tumbling down

Is it really all that different from "deep mind beat Gary Kasparov"?

At a trade show, I met a company that was advertising a feature as powered by Claude. I asked an employee what that meant, as it seemed unlikely, and he then didn’t know how answer so he introduced me to the CEO. The CEO said that the ad meant that Claude now writes all of their code including that new feature. They are now working on having Claude handle their QA process. I wondered if any of the devs were at the booth or if the employee I spoke to first was a dev who knew it was bs.

yes and no; you cant dump DNA in the context window and call it a day, in the blog post it was a common tool calling session. you do can have actual ml models for that, that the llm could use as a tool.

Why is it fake news, and how do you know that?

If by now you still think it's all just hype, it's safe to say you've succumbed to a mind virus that renders you unable to think critically about AI. Otherwise you'd have some level of awareness of just how far this technology has developed, and you should find these developments more than plausible.

seems like mythos 5 did most of the leg work, they refer to it in the technical report linked at the end: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326...

It could be an internal model as well.

I call Michelangelo!

I wonder how long it will take for the damage Alpöge and Buckmaster have done to the perception of these AI-driven scientific developments to fade.

Not saying that they were right or wrong, but that single moment sullied all AI-driven breakthroughs that came after it, and I don't think it was ever particularly relevant, at least not nearly to the degree that it was presented in the media. But I guess it ended up being a convenient outlet for AI anxiety in the end.

This is a very inaccurate manipulation of facts that fundamentally misrepresents everything that mathematicians wrote.

Lots of stuff gets discovered by AI bots that was always hidden in plain sight. They're remarkably good at "connecting the dots".

the article says the reverse transcriptase had been noticed before, but apparently only Claude commented on the subsequence repeating, to your point.

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It's not useful science; it has the rigor of someone posting a vague shower thought on Show HN or reddit.

You really think there aren’t an equal number of Claude influencers on social media?