AI Agents Are Moving Into the Real World

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

On the one hand, people continue to debate about whether there is actually a market for personal agents.

Some think that this is one where Silicon Valley entrepreneurs just have it wrong, that people don't actually want optimization and productivity in their personal lives. Others argue that that's a reductive view and that for all of the tasks that people actually enjoy, like certain types of shopping, there are a million other small annoying tasks that they would love to have automated away. Increasingly, that debate is getting new evidence. And as agents like Muse and GrokBot pick up steam, they are moving off of our screens and into the real world.

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Anthropic has announced what they are calling a big AI breakthrough in the biology field. Less than a week after confirming the existence of an AI-powered wet lab in the Bay Area, Anthropic has said, Claude discovered a novel enzyme system with properties reminiscent of CRISPR with only high-level direction from our scientists. CRISPR is gene-editing technology based on an enzyme sequence discovered in bacteria. It's used to mechanically cut DNA and splice in new genes. Anthropic's discovery looks similar to CRISPR in the way it features an array of repeated genomes. They acknowledge that they don't yet know its function or level of significance, but these enzyme systems are relatively rare and have previously unlocked capabilities like cutting, copying and inserting genes into DNA.

They claim the discovery took 1,000 Claude agents, 21 hours and around 210 million tokens, so somewhere on the order of $10,000 of compute. CEO Dario Amadei, who has a PhD in biophysics promoted the result on X. He wrote, It's easy to dismiss this as a one-off for curiosity, but we've repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023, models struggled to do math at the level of an average high school student. In 2024, they started to do well on math competitions for the best high schoolers in the country. In 2025, they started to solve minor open problems. In early 2026, more significant open problems. And in late 2026, they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend. Amadei said the need to confirm significant results using physical experiments is what led Anthropic to set up their wet lab. He disclosed that Claude isn't quite at the point of autonomously controlling lab equipment, but that's the end goal. He also mentioned that it's only a safety level 1 slash 2 biolab, meaning it doesn't handle materials that are dangerous to humans. Continuing, he wrote, In Machines of Love and Grace, I wrote about AI's potential to cure most diseases in 5 to 10 years. A goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with and then drive biological discoveries. Claude's discovery of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and viper in the past few years. I believe that we're at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology.

So what did people make of this? For some, it was way overhyped. Ravij Schwartz-Ziv writes, The sad thing is Dario knows better. He was a PhD student. He knows the significance level of this result. He knows that if he had walked into Bill's office, the advisor with, we found an interesting system, but we still don't know what it does, and said he was ready to graduate, Bill would have kicked him out of the room. But somehow when the IPO is around the corner, this becomes AI is starting to drive biological discovery.