San Francisco, Sept. 24 -- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Wednesday (local time) announced a biomedical breakthrough made by its AI system Claude. Amodei announced that Anthropic believes that a Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine could represent a new gene editing mechanism.

According to Anthropic, 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.

CRISPR ("clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats") is a technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms.

"We don't yet understand what this system does, but only a handful ...