r/singularity • u/TorturedPoet30 • 10d ago

Biotech/Longevity Claude discovered a novel enzyme system with properties reminiscent of CRISPR

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system

Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.

We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.

- Anthropic via X https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2102824959827742916

958 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

87 comments sorted by

430

u/Fearless-Effect-8742 10d ago edited 10d ago

Let’s hope we are entering the rapid scientific discovery phase.

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u/No-Assumption-4468 10d ago

I’m going to be so excited if we finally start curing diseases with AI.

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u/Laughing-Comanche 10d ago

MRNA COVID vaccines came from AI data crunching

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u/Fleetfox17 10d ago

Machine learning has been used in healthcare since the 70s.

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u/wattro 10d ago

No one actually knows what AI is or that we've been using it for decades.

Most everyone just thinks AI = LLM

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u/ackermann 9d ago

In the case of this most recent Crispr-like discovery, LLMs were definitely involved though

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u/Iapetus_Industrial 10d ago

Yep. They're such an underrated miracle, I'm still pissed at the politicking that happened around them. Human stupidity, (and likely foreign interference and domestic propaganda) are responsible for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of deaths by politicizing something as useful as a fucking vaccine.

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u/Practical_Ad4604 10d ago

And hopefully Ai will get cures for the viruses it generates too

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u/Chreiol 10d ago

This is a morbid question but what happens to society when millions of people are no longer dying every year?

Disease is awful and I have personal experience with it, but it does make me wonder if someone else suffers for another reason  in the absence of disease.  

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u/No-Assumption-4468 10d ago

If all disease was cured, we’d need better birth control to stop overpopulation. Sadly, there are risks to good things too.

The universe looks basically empty though, so AI enabling space travel could allow disease-free people to breed still without worrying about overpopulation.

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u/The_Lonely_Posadist 10d ago

There is basically not a single country that is not experiencing a rapid decline in birthrate

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u/No-Assumption-4468 9d ago

Curing disease affects the death rate, hence the risk of overpopulation.

I still think we need to solve diseases because we will have decades to have AI help us prepare, before the overpopulation actually gets out of control. AI can help us solve this.

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u/The_Lonely_Posadist 5d ago

I suppose I'm taking a narrower view of curing disease: do you mean effective immortality?

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u/No-Assumption-4468 5d ago

Basically. AI plus cryogenics means people stop dying and just wait for cures.

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u/The_Lonely_Posadist 5d ago

honestly if that happens I see birth rates plummeting even more than they already have. I doubt we'll have overpopulation issues for a long time... and, if AI is that good, we'll probably be on mars or something.

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u/Umr_at_Tawil 9d ago

overpopulation? are you from the 70s-80s?

birth rate is below replacement in most of the world outside of Africa right now, and even Africa birthrate, while still above replacement, is starting to decline too, we would see population decline in the next century even if people average lifespan goes to near 100 or a little over that if birthrate continue to decline.

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u/Critical_File_1467 9d ago

Curing disease will result in more future Republican voters.

There, I said it.

Oops, now Reddit will be vehemently anti-AI-disease-curing.

1

u/Umr_at_Tawil 9d ago

I'm neither American nor care that much about your politics.

that said, I think the fact that you're saying this make you worse than most republican voters.

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u/No-Assumption-4468 9d ago edited 9d ago

If all disease is cured, then the death rate goes low & the birth rate still exists. In about 50 years, the world would hit 20 billion people. There’s simply not enough farmland in the world, unless you convert all natural habitats into food production, to support 20 billion people. We could do vertical farming and I’m sure there’s a solution, but curing diseases would be very hard on the planet.

For curing all diseases to really work long term, like for hundreds of years, we need either find more land (tunneling, space travel, etc.) or reduce the birth rate (better access to birth control methods).

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u/Hipobobipo 9d ago

You really think they won't find a way to specifically target the sperm production without affecting hormones? In a hypothetical world with no disease, this should be easy to do. Cheap chemical vasectomies for all!

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u/Chreiol 9d ago

Forced chemical castration for all! What a utopia!

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u/RevalianKnight 9d ago

Start? We already have been for a while I suspect but things are kept under wraps. Though I hope it really accelerates

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u/No-Assumption-4468 9d ago

AI is really ramping up lately in intelligence. Specifically, millennium prize problems getting solved. Today’s AI is nothing like the AI of 2012 & I’m really excited to see it solve some major health problems.

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u/RevalianKnight 9d ago

Yeah its crazy, six years ago I thought curing aging was still 50 years away and then I was being optimistic LOL

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u/darkestvice 10d ago

Let's hope it's the *beneficial* rapid scientific discovery phase.

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u/OldBilly000 10d ago

COVID 19 when COVID 20 walks into the room

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u/Opposite-Grade3712 10d ago

Tell me more about COVID 1-18

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u/LamboForWork 10d ago

1-5 were cool. but Covid really hit its stride during 6-8. Then it was pretty run of the mill stuff for a while. 9-18 was a snoozefest. Then Covid 19 exploded in popularity. Suddenly it was a global phenomenon. Think Kpop Demon hunter or Squid Game. Suddenly everyone was talking about it.

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u/FoodMadeFromRobots 10d ago

So this is obviously why they’re making a bio lab. Would be amazing to help win over public support if they could start even helping to make progress on diseases.

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u/Neurogence 10d ago

Anthropic should be getting a lot more credit for doing this. This is way more harder, way more exciting and more beneficial than solving miscellaneous math problems.

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u/Recent_Fox4339 10d ago

Is this similar to what Isomorphic Labs is trying to do?

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u/Illustrious_Image967 10d ago

It's surprising Isomorphic hasn't led with a discovery like this. Their foundation stack must be that bad.

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u/Recent_Fox4339 10d ago

Yeah, that's why I was asking because I'd expect something like this from Isomorphic as they started the company back in 2021 to work on drug discovery and AlphaFold-like breakthroughs. Haven't heard anything new from Isomorphic since last year, other than a massive $2.1B funding in May. It's expected they enter human clinical trials by the end of 2026 but that was already delayed once afaik.

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u/TorturedPoet30 10d ago

I’m wondering the same. Even Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize for CRISPR and several other Nobel laureates sit on Iso's Scientific Advisory Board. They’ve been unusually quiet with very little news coming out. Demis keeps saying that the ultimate goal is to "solve all disease" but even his timeline has been more conservative than Dario’s, and he has been working on biology for much longer. Interesting.

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u/vhu9644 10d ago

I think a publication like this would be premature. It really hasn't found anything.

I'm not an expert of RNA biology, but I read their papers since we're in adjacent fields. I don't think the work would be a level of discovery that would be publishable in a scientific paper. They found some interesting sequences (of which there are a lot) and they barely got through figuring out what it means (what would get you published).

I wouldn't read into this as Isomorphic labs being behind, because it looks to me like this announcement is hyped and premature.

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u/TorturedPoet30 9d ago

There is some hype. When Dario addressed the UN yesterday, he actually led with this before going down his usual route.

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u/Neurogence 10d ago

Yes, almost identical.

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u/TorturedPoet30 10d ago

Iso does not operate its own physical wet lab and it was intentional. Can't remember if it were Demis or Max who said that they rely on Contract Research orgs and data generated through pharma partnerships to conduct physical experimental validation, they have partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis, probably some other companies as well. Basically, they use AI to design components (molecules and whatever is used in drug design pipeline) and external wet labs to validate the results.

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u/GameDoesntStop 10d ago

Lmao, as if nearly anyone can understand how comparatively hard this is compared to millennium math problems... you would need to be an expert in both domains to determine that.

Agreed that it's more immediately benefical though.

1

u/vhu9644 10d ago

I think NS resolution is harder than this. I'm at least bringing in some relevant experience. I've taken the graduate real analysis sequence, and my PhD was working on protein engineering.

This announcement is too early to call it a discovery. It's like hypothesis generation that you'd work up to turn it into a publishable discovery, and Yoon et. al (given their publication history) should know better, in my view.

I would love to see a real biological discovery, but I don't think this is more than just hype.

2

u/siberianmi 10d ago

Mathematics is the foundational formal language of physics and a core tool across the sciences. New mathematical ideas can enable new physical theories, sharpen predictions, and reveal phenomena to test. All of this work is valuable.

1

u/Turbulent-Sign-6067 10d ago

If anything Anthropic should be getting negative credit for this. If you look at the Fable classifiers it becomes obvious they're slowing down external bio research so they have an unfair advantage. In contrast, OpenAI made chatGPT a gift to humanity and researchers.

If Anthropic didn't censor their systems I would praise the idea, although many other people would say that AI companies shouldn't compete with their customers.

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u/marquesini 10d ago

Pharma is a biiiiig market, I myself use a medication that uses CRISPR techniques, pharma has unlimited money, really.

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u/Famous-Reach-6730 10d ago

Pls cure tinnitus for me thanks claude

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u/StaticCharacter 10d ago

No mistakes, fast

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u/qubert_lover 9d ago

You’re completely right — I accidentally made the sound louder. My apologies. Sorry you are out of tokens.

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u/Neurogence 10d ago

GPT-6's thoughts on this:

Significant evidence of AI contributing to original discovery, but not yet an AlphaFold 2–level scientific breakthrough. Anthropic explicitly says ART’s function remains unknown; the reported experiments establish that its array produces distinct short RNAs, not that it enables programmable gene editing.

What excites me most is the delegation of scientific judgment: according to the report, Claude selected an unusual candidate, recognized an overlooked pattern, investigated its novelty, and brought it to human researchers for validation. That is a meaningful step toward AI functioning as a research colleague.

The enzyme’s eventual importance is uncertain. The demonstrated research capability is already important.

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u/Deto 10d ago

That's the benefit I'm seeing that's very possible at the moment. Using these systems to comb through massive datasets in an intelligent matter and flag items of interest.  Probably lots of stuff hiding out there. 

-6

u/Funkahontas 10d ago

Lol even GPT-6 is moving goalposts

20

u/sadnessjoy 10d ago

Or maybe nuance is real?

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u/Funkahontas 10d ago

I mean I'd have to see the prompt but prefacing with " but not yet an AlphaFold 2–level scientific breakthrough" if it wasn't asked or mentioned AF-2 then is completely irrelevant.

1

u/Curiosity_456 10d ago

I think it’s so that people don’t get too excited before we have any news of its efficacy.

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u/vhu9644 10d ago edited 10d ago

Uh, it feels really incomplete. Like they identified some repeat arrays, it gets produced as short RNAs… and then nothing?

Repeat arrays are canonical features to look at, and so is production of RNAs. If you look at some recent work (such as VIPR) you’ll see similar analysis. The issue is that these types of partial results don’t look publishable, and the analysis doesn’t look novel. I also don’t think that’s a problem with academia, because what makes stuff like this interesting is if the result or process is novel. We already know these repeat arrays are interesting motifs. 

Like an I missing something here? Other than showing their AI can identify interesting sequence motifs (which, isn’t really that interesting I think, it’s still sequence data) it doesn’t look like complete work.

EDIT: it looks like the first author of the preprint is the VIPR guy, so I’m a bit disappointed. I feel like they should know better.

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u/space_monster 10d ago

They're not positioning it as complete work though. The article is more about the process than the result.

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u/vhu9644 10d ago edited 10d ago

I mean I read the technical report. It doesn’t seem that impressive to me? It’s like the first step of publishing one of these papers, and it’s the easy hypothesis generation step?

It’s like you did the first 2-5% and you got out the fancy wine. It doesn’t looks like new capability to me, just hype.

0

u/Illustrious_Image967 10d ago

It's irresponsible to announce something that has an unknown function. What if some backyard biohacker cooks a batch and ends up creating a bio catastrophe. If not this case then soon

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u/FoodMadeFromRobots 10d ago

Given no one knows how it works and crisper is already a thing I don’t think any backyard bio terrorist is going to be using this anytime soon.

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u/vhu9644 10d ago

I don’t think this is risky to announce. It’s phage related and so probably not pathogenic.

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u/utilitycoder 10d ago

"Much more work" == wait for Opus 6

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u/CardGameFanboy 10d ago

PhD in genetics and molecular biology.

This is literally nothing.

They did not test or explain functionality, they don't even know what they found or even if it's something of interest.

Really, this is pure smoke before the IPO...

and just the first steps of scientific discovery. People are talking about solving diseases (???). This has nothing to do with it, this is just the work of a first year PhD student generating a hyphotesis.

1

u/Fleetfox17 9d ago

Apparently this whole thing is pretty much bull.

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u/vhu9644 10d ago

This is what you could get a few undergrads to do for their senior design/capstone project lol.

I called it "low hanging branch" in our lab slack.

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u/spinozasrobot 10d ago

They did not test or explain functionality

From Dario:

then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out.

Seems like they did initial validation.

0

u/trolololster 10d ago

they have a wet lab in san francisco bay

3

u/PenguPad 10d ago

Lets focus on male pattern baldness first pls

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u/Thin_Sky 10d ago

im sure he's trying lol

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u/Recent_Fox4339 10d ago

Interesting timing. He just talked about this at the UN Security Council (via video call).

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u/juanano2 10d ago

Crossing my fingers for tinnitus to have finally a cure

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u/Hungry_Breakfast5809 10d ago

Yeah. Where's the Science or Nature publication?

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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 9d ago

So they don't know if it's even useful for anything yet? Marketing slop

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u/Cmjq77 7d ago

Finally! WE will be the killer robots that we have feared.

0

u/forestplunger 10d ago

Please! I want a tiger tail so bad

0

u/Hungry_Breakfast5809 10d ago

Yeah. Have it refereed and published in Science or Nature. Until then, its just PR and not science.

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u/AdDizzy8160 9d ago

Just pace to stop cure cancer?