950 agents turned 200,000 enzymes into one new candidate
Claude agents, one database sweep · bar width on a logarithmic scale (the drop spans five orders of magnitude)
Reverse transcriptases gathered200,000+
Public sequence data — the pile the agents started from.
New candidate systems3,500
Family members and genomic neighbours matching nothing already described.
Reports written and analysed20
One human-readable report per survivor — the artifact a scientist can check or reject.
System confirmed in the lab1
ART — array-associated reverse transcriptases, found in bacteriophage DNA.
Reported by Anthropic, September 2026: roughly 950 Claude agents, 21 hours, 210 million tokens. The underlying reverse transcriptase was already known; the associated repeat array and accessory protein were not. Pre-print, not peer reviewed.