Anthropic Claims AI Discovered Enzymes Amid Data Use Dispute
Anthropic claims its AI agents independently discovered new enzymes, but a biologist alleges the company used his unpublished research to reach the finding.
AI company Anthropic claims its AI agents independently discovered array-associated reverse transcriptases (ARTs), enzymes with significant potential for biotechnology. Chief Executive Dario Amodei stated that such applications will accelerate rapidly and could lead to progress on diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia.
Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, disputes the claim of independent discovery. Mestre asserts that he and his colleagues discovered the same systems, which they call jumbotrons, years ago. He alleges that he shared unpublished manuscripts and data analysis with the Claude model during his research, raising concerns that the AI was guided by his work or that his data was used for training.
Anthropic denied that Claude was trained on user transcripts and stated its molecular biology team had no access to such data. The company maintained that it was not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system it found. This dispute follows a similar pattern to a controversy involving OpenAI, where a mathematician suggested the company may have used customer data to solve a mathematics puzzle.
