Anthropic says Claude made a discovery; biologist disputes the claim

Anthropic announced that it launched a molecular biology lab earlier this year, where Claude agents analyze problems and human scientists run experiments. The company says 950 agents, working for 21 hours, found a repeating pattern around a known enzyme—not a new sequence—and that the pattern had not previously been catalogued.

According to MIT Technology Review, biologists challenged the characterization as a discovery, arguing that identifying the pattern is only one step and that its function would still need to be established. Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen, told The New York Times that his team had already found the pattern and wondered whether Anthropic may have learned from his conversations with Claude; Anthropic denies it. The case has renewed debate over when AI makes a discovery rather than merely assisting scientific work.