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. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system

We’re partnering with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI—part of our recent commitment to embed evaluators at Anthropic. Both we and Accenture expect to invest at least $1 billion to build capacity in this area over the next five years. https://www.anthropic.com/news/accenture-embedded-evaluation

New on the Science Blog: Yes, Claude can do Nine Loops. Theoretical physicists predict how particles behave using formulas called scattering amplitudes. These are notoriously hard to compute, so researchers work with layers of increasingly fine corrections called “loops”—each added loop makes the answer more precise but takes exponentially more computation. Most calculations stop at two or three loops. Eight loops was the previous record in a simplified model physicists use as a testing ground (planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills), set by SLAC's Lance Dixon and collaborators. Last month, physicist and science writer @4gravitons issued a challenge: could an AI push past eight loops in this model, using only the compute budget an academic could reasonably access? Given a single prompt describing the nine-loop problem, Claude ran largely unsupervised for days in Claude Science and solved it using methods developed by Dixon and his colleagues, at a total cost of a few thousand dollars. Dixon independently verified the result, and von Hippel wrote about the experience for our blog. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/research/yes-claude-can-do-nine-loops

Claude Opus 5.5 is available today.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 is now available:

Biologists use specialized open-source models for tasks like modeling the structure of molecular systems, designing drug-like molecules, and predicting the effects of genetic mutations. But these models are often expensive to run, potentially limiting their impact. In our latest Science Blog, we share how Claude was able to optimize inference for more than 30 open-source models, making them 4x faster on average, partly by writing custom software for GPUs. We’re open sourcing all of the optimization code. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-uplifts-biomolecular-modeling

What do you want from AI? We’re launching a new study with Anthropic Interviewer to learn more about your experiences using AI, what role you want it to play in your life and the world, and what you want from the companies building it. Last December, 81,000 people told us about their hopes and fears about AI in the largest qualitative study ever done. This time, we’re giving participants the option to make their responses public so that anyone, not just Anthropic, can learn from them. What you tell us will shape The Anthropic Institute’s research and inform the decisions we make. If many people say companies like Anthropic should be doing something differently, that will be on the record, where anyone can point to it. The study runs Sept 29 to Oct 6 and is open to Free, Pro, and Max users on Claude and Claude Code. Take part here: http://claude.ai/anthropic-interviewer/your-thoughts-on-ai?from=social

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, global health organizations including @CEPIvaccines, @WHOAFRO, and @inrb_kinshasa are using Claude to accelerate their response to an outbreak of an unusual Ebola variant. Read the full piece here: https://www.anthropic.com/features/ebola-response

We're deepening our commitment to scientific research and technological discovery by committing $150 million to the Genesis Mission. We'll also make Claude and our technical support available to more than 15 federal agencies. https://www.anthropic.com/news/genesis-mission-commitment

New on our Science Blog: designing protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins. Scorpions sting about 1.2m people every year, and antivenoms are often costly or in short supply. Claude has made an early step toward finding new treatments. https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-scorpion-toxin-binder-design

New from our STEM Fellows Program: Designing more efficient quantum circuits with Claude. Given plain-language instructions, Claude Mythos 5 designed quantum circuits that improve on the best published ones, sometimes by an order of magnitude or more. More efficient circuits reduce the resources needed by quantum algorithms, which could bring quantum computing applications in chemistry and materials science within reach sooner. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits

An astrophysicist worked with Claude Science to create the first complete ultraviolet map of the sky. Astronomers have already created complete sky maps from radio to gamma rays. But large regions of the sky have never been observed in UV. In today’s science blog, Brice Ménard explains how he guided Claude to find existing datasets, combine them, and fill in the gaps with statistical inference. The work would have taken humans weeks of work, but, with Claude, just took a few days while Ménard worked on other projects. The resulting map is a useful teaching tool and an example of exactly the sort of slow, low-priority work which scientists never quite get around to, but which AI now makes feasible. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/research/the-missing-map-of-the-sky