Anthropic’s enzyme-system research used approximately 950 Claude agents, consuming 210 million tokens over 21 hours to screen 3,500 candidate systems.

Anthropic announced a life-sciences research team and laboratory (生命科学研究团队及实验室), alongside early biological research results involving Claude. Researchers reported analyzing more than 200,000 reverse transcriptase (RT) sequences (“超过 20 万个逆转录酶（RT）序列”).

According to Anthropic’s account, approximately 950 agents used 210 million tokens over 21 hours to screen 3,500 candidate systems, subsequently narrowing the set to 20. Those figures describe the agent-assisted research workflow, not GPU-hours, training compute, or laboratory experiment counts.

The researchers identified a previously undescribed system named array-associated reverse transcriptase (ART; 阵列相关逆转录酶). Found mainly in bacteriophages that infect bacteria, it comprises a reverse transcriptase, nearby accessory genes, and regularly arranged DNA repeat sequences with similarities to CRISPR repeats.

Preliminary experiments found that the repeats are also transcribed into multiple short RNAs (多个短 RNA), but their specific functions remain under investigation. Anthropic scientists performed experimental validation and released a preprint; the report does not establish a demonstrated gene-editing function for ART.