Anthropic publishes preliminary results on ART, an enzyme system identified with Claude

On 23 September 2026, Anthropic published preliminary results on ART, an enzyme system identified in DNA sequences with Claude agents. The company reports that human scientists then studied ART in the laboratory.

The existence of Anthropic’s laboratory was already known. Reuters had confirmed its existence on 18 September 2026, five days before the publication of the results on ART.

ART stands for “array-associated reverse transcriptases,” meaning reverse transcriptases associated with an array of repeated sequences. A reverse transcriptase is an enzyme that copies RNA, ribonucleic acid, into DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. Anthropic says it found ART mainly in bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria.

The reverse transcriptase underlying ART had already been identified in earlier research, Reuters notes in a report republished by CNA. Anthropic claims to have identified the system organized around this enzyme, with an adjacent partner gene and an array of DNA sequences repeated at regular intervals.

Claude sorts the candidates, researchers run the experiments

In the method described by Anthropic, Claude agents scan genomic data and the scientific literature to identify anomalies. They compare candidates, then write reports proposing possible functions with supporting evidence. Researchers review these proposals to choose which leads to test and carry out the experiments themselves.

Anthropic reports around 950 agents and 21 hours of computational research. The company says it used 210 million tokens, the units of text processed by the model. The 21 hours exclude laboratory experiments; this figure does not measure any comparative time savings for a confirmed discovery.

The company says it collected more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, selected 3,500 candidate systems, then explored 20 leads in depth and documented them. These numbers refer to different types of items at each stage. The figure of 20 counts hypotheses explored in depth, without establishing an equivalent number of experimentally validated discoveries.

Experiments show expression of ART’s array

Anthropic reports that initial experiments show expression of ART’s array of repeated sequences as distinct short RNAs. The company presents these results in a preprint and acknowledges that the system’s main biological function remains unknown.

The comparison between ART and CRISPR concerns the organization of the repeated sequences. ART’s programmability and capacity for gene editing remain to be demonstrated.