Shares of several gene-editing companies declined Wednesday following Anthropic's announcement that its Claude artificial intelligence model had autonomously identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system with properties reminiscent of CRISPR.

Among the companies whose shares moved lower were Beam Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, Prime Medicine, Q32 Bio and LENZ Therapeutics. The market reaction came after Anthropic unveiled the discovery as the first result from its newly established life sciences research group and laboratory.

Anthropic said Claude identified what researchers are calling array-associated reverse transcriptases, or ARTs, after searching a massive database of DNA sequences. The system is associated with a reverse transcriptase, a nearby partner gene and an array of repeated DNA sequences that resemble the arrays found in CRISPR systems.

The company said its scientists provided the initial research direction and conducted the subsequent laboratory work, while Claude agents carried out much of the computational investigation. Anthropic said roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours examining more than 200 million tokens of data, identifying more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases before narrowing the candidates to systems requiring further analysis.

The exact function of ARTs remains unknown. Anthropic said initial experiments indicate that the repeat array is expressed as distinct short RNA molecules, but further laboratory work is needed to determine how the system operates and whether it could eventually have practical applications.

The discovery is notable because CRISPR technology has become a foundation of modern gene-editing research. CRISPR Therapeutics, for example, developed its technology around CRISPR/Cas9, the gene-editing system associated with Nobel Prize-winning research by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

Anthropic said the finding demonstrates how AI could help scientists search enormous biological datasets for patterns that might otherwise take human researchers weeks or months to identify. The company said its new laboratory is focused on using Claude to examine DNA, generate hypotheses and help researchers select candidates for experimental testing.

The announcement also comes as Anthropic expands its presence in biological research. The company established a Bay Area wet laboratory earlier this year and has said its life sciences efforts include fundamental biology research as well as work related to drug discovery.

While the market reaction affected established gene-editing companies, Anthropic has not claimed that ART represents a replacement for CRISPR or an immediately usable gene-editing technology. The company is continuing experiments to determine the system's biological function and potential applications.