Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big
Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big
Anthropic 称其生物实验室已取得重大发现
Last week, Anthropic confirmed that it was operating a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its AI models to run physical experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that this lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a new enzyme “system” that has certain “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” as Anthropic describes it.
上周，Anthropic 证实其在湾区运营着一家湿实验室，利用其人工智能模型进行物理实验。本周，这家 AI 巨头宣布，该实验室已经取得了他们认为重大的发现：一种新的酶“系统”，正如 Anthropic 所描述的那样，它具有某些“让人联想到 CRISPR 的特性”。
CRISPR is a natural immune system used by bacteria to fight off viruses that has become a gene-editing technology widely used by researchers. Essentially, what Anthropic says it found is a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. Anthropic’s researchers say this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can “perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.”
CRISPR 是细菌用来抵御病毒的一种天然免疫系统，现已成为研究人员广泛使用的基因编辑技术。本质上，Anthropic 声称发现的是一种隐藏在噬菌体（感染并复制于细菌内部的病毒）DNA 中此前未知的酶系统。Anthropic 的研究人员表示，该系统的行为与 CRISPR 类似，能够“执行剪切、复制和粘贴 DNA 等操作”。
It will be up to the broader research community to validate how big, or new, this discovery actually is. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledges that the discovery was based on the work of others and that a team from Stanford previously discovered a system “that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found,” he wrote on X. But Amodei and Anthropic are not just emphasizing the discovery. They are touting it was found “mostly, though not entirely, by Claude,” the CEO wrote.
这一发现究竟有多重大或多新颖，还有待更广泛的研究界进行验证。Anthropic 首席执行官 Dario Amodei 在 X 上发文承认，这一发现基于他人的研究成果，斯坦福大学的一个团队此前曾发现过一个“在某些方面与 Claude 所发现的系统相似”的系统。但 Amodei 和 Anthropic 不仅仅是在强调这一发现，这位 CEO 还宣称，该发现是“主要（尽管并非全部）由 Claude”完成的。
On the one hand, that is astounding. This lab was only established this spring (though Anthropic declined to be more specific about how many months it has been open). A discovery in just a few short months would be speedy enough work, but the team said it actually only took Claude 21 hours of concerted effort. Claude searched through data using about 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens.
一方面，这令人震惊。该实验室今年春天刚刚成立（尽管 Anthropic 拒绝透露具体运营了几个月）。在短短几个月内取得发现已经足够迅速，但团队表示，Claude 实际上只用了 21 小时的协同努力。Claude 使用了约 950 个智能体搜索数据，消耗了 2.1 亿个 Token。
Still, the revelation that Anthropic has been conducting biology experiments comes right after AI CEOs, including Amodei, publicly admitted that models have become so capable, and so potentially dangerous, that the industry must slow down and develop safety-testing procedures. This after a couple of his employees publicly said earlier this month that there’s a risk AI could kill us all. Amodei himself has said one of the things he fears most is that AI could be used for bioterrorism. But he also believes AI will “cure most diseases in 5-10 years,” he wrote.
尽管如此，Anthropic 一直在进行生物实验的消息披露，正值包括 Amodei 在内的 AI 行业高管公开承认模型能力已变得如此强大且具有潜在危险，以至于行业必须放慢脚步并制定安全测试程序之际。此前，他的几名员工在本月初公开表示，AI 存在导致人类灭绝的风险。Amodei 本人也曾表示，他最担心的事情之一就是 AI 可能被用于生物恐怖主义。但他同时也写道，他相信 AI 将在“5 到 10 年内治愈大多数疾病”。
So Anthropic has clearly decided the rewards are worth the risks. Given that, perhaps the biggest reveal in this news isn’t the discovery itself but that the biology lab hasn’t let Claude loose. The physical experiments were done by humans. “Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists.”
因此，Anthropic 显然认为回报值得冒险。鉴于此，这则新闻中最大的揭秘或许不是发现本身，而是生物实验室并没有让 Claude “放手去做”。物理实验是由人类完成的。“我们位于湾区的实验室看起来就像一个典型的分子生物学实验室。我们只进行涉及低级别生物安全风险（BSL-1 和 BSL-2）的研究，且不处理能感染人类的病原体。所有的实验室工作均由人类科学家执行。”
It’s also true that AI-powered biological research is hardly unique to Anthropic. Researchers from Stanford just published a paper on the work they are doing with LLMs and CRISPR. Researchers at UC San Francisco used AI to design enzymes from scratch. Google launched its first AI-powered biology research tool, AlphaFold, back in 2020. So AI has clearly arrived in biological research beyond the AI labs pursuing it themselves.
同样真实的是，AI 驱动的生物研究并非 Anthropic 所独有。斯坦福大学的研究人员刚刚发表了一篇关于他们利用大语言模型（LLM）和 CRISPR 进行研究的论文。加州大学旧金山分校的研究人员利用 AI 从零开始设计酶。谷歌早在 2020 年就推出了其首个 AI 驱动的生物研究工具 AlphaFold。因此，AI 显然已经进入了除 AI 实验室自身研究之外的生物研究领域。
Yet, Amodei hasn’t ruled out a fully automated biology lab in the future. “Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today,” he said.
然而，Amodei 并没有排除未来建立全自动化生物实验室的可能性。“最终，Claude 本身甚至有可能在采取适当安全措施的情况下，通过自主控制实验室设备来安全地执行实验，但我们目前还没有这样做，”他说。