上周，Anthropic 证实其在旧金山湾区运营着一间湿式生物实验室，并利用其 AI 模型进行物理实验。本周，这家 AI 巨头宣布，该实验室已经取得了它认为是一项重大发现：一种新的酶“系统”，Anthropic 将其描述为具有某些“类似 CRISPR 的特性”。

CRISPR 是细菌用来抵御病毒的一种天然免疫系统，现已成为研究人员广泛使用的基因编辑技术。

本质上，Anthropic 声称他们发现的是一种隐藏在噬菌体 DNA 中的此前未知的酶系统，噬菌体是感染并在细菌内复制的病毒。Anthropic 的研究人员表示，该系统与 CRISPR 的行为类似，因为它可以“执行切割、复制和粘贴 DNA 等操作”。

这项发现究竟有多大、有多新，有待更广泛的研究界来验证。Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei 承认，这一发现基于他人的工作，且斯坦福大学的一个团队此前已经发现了一个“在某种程度上与 Claude 发现的系统相似”的系统，他在 X 上写道。

但 Amodei 和 Anthropic 不仅仅是在强调这一发现。他们宣传称，该发现“主要是由 Claude 完成的，尽管并非完全如此”，这位首席执行官写道。

一方面，这令人惊叹。这个实验室直到今年春天才成立（尽管 Anthropic 拒绝透露其开放了几个月）。在短短几个月内取得发现已经算是高效的工作，但团队表示，实际上 Claude 仅用了 21 小时的集中努力。Claude 使用约 950 个代理搜索数据，消耗了 2.1 亿个 token。

尽管如此，Anthropic 正在进行生物实验的披露紧随其后，此前包括 Amodei 在内的 AI 首席执行官们公开承认，模型已经变得如此强大且潜在危险，以至于行业必须放慢步伐并开发安全测试程序。这发生在他的一些员工在本月初公开表示存在 AI 可能杀死全人类的风险之后。

Amodei 本人曾表示，他最担心的事情之一是 AI 可能被用于生物恐怖主义。但他也相信 AI 将在“5-10 年内治愈大多数疾病”，他写道。因此，Anthropic 显然认为回报值得冒险。

鉴于此，也许这则新闻中最大的揭示并非发现本身，而是该生物实验室并没有让 Claude 完全自由行动。物理实验是由人类完成的。

“我们的实验室位于旧金山湾区，看起来像是一个典型的分子生物学实验室。我们进行的研究仅涉及生物安全风险的较低级别（BSL-1 和 BSL-2），我们不处理能感染人类的病原体。所有实验室工作均由人类科学家完成。”

同样属实的是，由 AI 驱动的生物研究在 Anthropic 之外并不罕见。斯坦福大学的研究人员最近发表了一篇关于他们使用 LLM 和 CRISPR 进行工作的论文。加州大学旧金山分校的研究人员利用 AI 从头设计酶。谷歌早在 2020 年就推出了其首个 AI 驱动的生物研究工具 AlphaFold。因此，AI 显然已经进入了生物研究领域，而不仅仅是追求这一技术的 AI 实验室。

然而，Amodei 并未排除未来实现完全自动化的生物实验室的可能性。“最终，在适当的安全措施到位的情况下，Claude 本身甚至可能通过自主控制实验室设备来安全地执行实验，但我们今天并没有这样做，”他说。

Last week, Anthropic confirmed that it was operating a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its AI models to run physical experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that this lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a new enzyme “system” that has certain “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” as Anthropic describes it .

CRISPR is a natural immune system used by bacteria to fight off viruses that has become a gene-editing technology widely used by researchers .

Essentially, what Anthropic says it found is a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. Anthropic’s researchers say this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can “perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.”

It will be up to the broader research community to validate how big, or new, this discovery actually is. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledges that the discovery was based on the work of others and that a team from Stanford previously discovered a system “that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found,” he wrote on X .

But Amodei and Anthropic are not just emphasizing the discovery. They are touting it was found “mostly, though not entirely, by Claude,” the CEO wrote.

On the one hand, that is astounding. This lab was only established this spring (though Anthropic declined to be more specific about how many months it has been open). A discovery in just a few short months would be speedy enough work, but the team said it actually only took Claude 21 hours of concerted effort. Claude searched through data using about 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens.

Still, the revelation that Anthropic has been conducting biology experiments comes right after AI CEOs, including Amodei , publicly admitted that models have become so capable, and so potentially dangerous, that the industry must slow down and develop safety-testing procedures. This after a couple of his employees publicly said earlier this month that there’s a risk AI could kill us all .

Amodei himself has said one of the things he fears most is that AI could be used for bioterrorism. But he also believes AI will “cure most diseases in 5-10 years,” he wrote. So Anthropic has clearly decided the rewards are worth the risks.

Given that, perhaps the biggest reveal in this news isn’t the discovery itself but that the biology lab hasn’t let Claude loose. The physical experiments were done by humans.

“Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists.”

It’s also true that AI-powered biological research is hardly unique to Anthropic. Researchers from Stanford just published a paper on the work they are doing with LLMs and CRISPR. Researchers at UC San Francisco used AI to design enzymes from scratch . Google launched its first AI-powered biology research tool, AlphaFold, back in 2020 . So AI has clearly arrived in biological research beyond the AI labs pursuing it themselves.

Yet, Amodei hasn’t ruled out a fully automated biology lab in the future. “Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today,” he said.

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