Agents at the Lab Bench

Anthropic's new Bay Area life sciences lab ran 950 Claude agents for 21 hours and 210 million tokens to scan 200,000 reverse transcriptases in bacteriophage genomes, narrowing to 20 candidates and identifying a previously uncharacterized system — array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART) — that structurally resembles CRISPR arrays and may be programmable for DNA operations.

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After AlphaFold, Jumper Places a New Bet

John Jumper, who led AlphaFold and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic. The interesting question isn't who won the talent war — it's what his choice says about where the hard problems in biology AI go next, and why a safety-focused lab might actually be the right place to work on them.

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