950 Claude agents find a CRISPR-like enzyme system in 21 hours
Anthropic's Claude Code swarm pulled a gene-editing candidate from raw DNA — the agent method is the reusable part. Plus OpenAI's open mental-health eval.
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What ART is, and why editing labs care
Claude flagged “array-associated reverse transcriptases” (ART) in bacteriophages: a reverse transcriptase paired with CRISPR-like DNA repeat arrays and an unknown accessory protein. Human scientists confirmed it at the bench. If it holds up, it's a fresh scaffold for programmable gene editing beyond Cas9.
The reusable trick: a 950-agent search swarm
The hit came from ~950 Claude agents — Claude Science plus Claude Code and custom coordination harnesses — sweeping a giant sequence database, burning 210M tokens over 21 hours, until one spotted the repeat pattern. The pattern to steal: fan many agents out over a search space, then have humans validate the top candidates.
OpenAI open-sources MentalHealthBench
A new benchmark for safe, helpful replies in mental-health conversations, built with 80+ licensed clinicians across 22 countries. It scores ten behaviors — safety, context-seeking, preserving user agency, actionable guidance — across non-acute, high-acuity, and emergency cases. If you ship any support or companion chat, it's a ready-made eval.