When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.
Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.
Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.
In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.
“So, for me, the most important question is not ‘Were ARTs already known?’ They were,” Dr. Mestre said in an interview. The issue instead, he added, is whether Anthropic’s A.I. actually reasoned its way to the results, or whether it was guided to them based partly on his own work.
“My concern is that this information was used to train future versions of the models,” Dr. Mestre said of his own research. “I think it’s important to raise this possibility.”
In a statement on Sunday, Anthropic said: “We are not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system we recently found. Claude was also not trained on any user transcripts, and our molecular biology team has no such access, either.”
Anthropic said that Claude’s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Dr. Maestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery over a year ago.
Similar worries surfaced recently when researchers at OpenAI claimed to have solved a longstanding mathematics puzzle. A leading mathematician noted that he had been using the company’s A.I. to work toward a solution for some time.
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Anthropic, which is expected to go public at a valuation potentially as high as $2 trillion, has touted biological research as a central part of its mission.
“We believe this type of application will accelerate rapidly in the years ahead, and that we can make profound progress in the near future on diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, said in a speech to the United Nations on Wednesday.
In their report last week, Anthropic researchers said they instructed A.I. agents to search databases containing billions of gene sequences. The scientists did not describe the precise prompts they had used.
The databases contain DNA collected from the ocean, soil and other habitats. The genes belong mostly to microbes and viruses; scientists have only determined what a fraction of them do.
Anthropic’s scientists tasked the A.I. with finding genes that direct production of enzymes called reverse transcriptases. These enzymes read the sequence of an RNA molecule and make a matching DNA molecule with the same sequence.
Bacteria use some reverse transcriptases to sense invading viruses. Some viruses rely on reverse transcriptases as weapons against other viruses.
The Anthropic scientists provided the A.I. with five examples of reverse transcriptases. The agents wrote their own software to explore the databases for similar genes and to look closely at promising candidates.
The agents identified genes for possible reverse transcriptases in bacteria-infecting viruses known as jumbo phages. Each of those sequences was located close to an array of genes for RNA molecules, which may help the enzymes carry out their jobs.
