Anthropic has brought us back to the oldest question: was humanity artificially engineered?

Claude was given a broad task to search huge DNA databases for unusual reverse transcriptases, which is an interesting task in itself, because we were told that residual DNA in the mRNA vaccines is no problem at all, which, obviously, was wrong.

Around 950 Claude agents ran for 21 hours, consuming roughly 210 million tokens, gathered more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, produced about 3,500 candidate systems and narrowed those to 20 particularly interesting ones.

One agent noticed that an unusual reverse transcriptase sat beside a long, regularly spaced array of repeated DNA sequences, which resembles CRISPR.

The repeated DNA array is expressed as multiple short RNAs, and the combination of an enzyme, RNA repeats and an accessory protein resembles a small group of known biological systems that can be programmed to cut, copy or paste DNA.

They named it ART. Function unknown.

Humanity spent thousands of years asking who created us. We will probably never solve this question, but, finally, thanks to AI, humans may have gained access to the tools to reprogram themselves.

A whole graduating class that can digest cellulose.

Athletes banned for “unapproved repeat arrays.”

Customer support - Have you tried turning your genome off and on again?

Historians of 2090 trying to explain why so many of us have the same jawline and the same inability to taste coriander.

The future of human biological evolution is now, at last, within humanity’s reach, and we are excited to see the results very soon.