2026-09-28 / Signal #5
A biologist says Claude’s “CRISPR-like discovery” was already his homework
“It took 950 agents 21 hours to find something a human had been staring at for four years.”
The Story
After Anthropic said ~950 Claude agents found a novel enzyme system (ARTs) in 21 hours, computational biologist Mario Rodríguez Mestre said his group had been studying those enzymes and associated molecules for four years. He is less hung up on “already known” than on whether Claude was steered by that work. Anthropic says it is not aware of prior published ART work and that Claude was not trained on user transcripts.
Why It Matters
Priority, training-data ghosts, and the awkward moment when “AI discovered biology” meets a human who already had the notebook.
Evidence
New York Times (Carl Zimmer, Sept 27); Anthropic statement in the same piece
Caveat
Do not call anyone a fraud; stage the credit fight and treat this as a follow-up to the already-covered enzyme claim.
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-09-28