Anthropic shares an exciting result in enzyme discovery - and an exercise in public's perception of science and AI

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Anthropic, these are my own thoughts as a former wet lab chemist currently working in chem-biosecurity and AI evals. I appreciate the complexity of scientific research and genuinely believe AI could play an important role in how we do science in the decades to come - but I have some concerns on how these labs, the media, and even the community, perceive and share this kind of news. I am basing my opinion on the announcement on X, and their official release on their website. Since posting this, a preprint came out, this is not considered below in my piece - and I think in a way that makes it even more relevant. TL;DR 'Agent X did this' and 'humans used agent X to do this' are two VERY different stances. Please stop using them interchangeably! Yesterday, 23rd Sep '26, Anthropic shared that their in-house Life Science unit made a new discovery in biology, aided by Claude - a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. The headline numbers are surprisingly small for the scale of the search - roughly 950 agents, 210 million tokens and 21 hours - although without more detail on the models, harness, search space and compute, those numbers are difficult to interpret. And it's not the only thing missing (especially for skeptics like me). Amodei acknowledged in his tweet himself that biology isn't maths, and you can't just prompt the AI to solve an equation in biology and you can cure diseases - life sciences are, by defini…