Copenhagen biologist suspects Claude drew on his research for enzyme “discovery”

Mario Rodriguez Mestre, a University of Copenhagen biologist who has studied the ART enzyme system for four years, said Anthropic’s Claude may have drawn on findings his team shared with the model, questioning the company’s claim that Claude discovered the system on its own.

Anthropic announced on September 23 that Claude had autonomously discovered a previously uncharacterized enzyme system resembling the DNA repeats behind CRISPR gene editing, after searching 1.9 billion protein clusters across nearly a thousand parallel agent sessions over 21 hours.

Mario Rodriguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said he and his colleagues have been studying the enzymes, which Anthropic calls ARTs, and their associated molecules for four years, and that his group, which has not yet published its findings, has regularly used Claude for three years to write code and draft manuscripts. He said they may have shared key findings with the model and that it should be clarified whether Claude reached its conclusion through its own reasoning or was influenced by their research.

Anthropic’s AI model Claude