A few thoughts on Anthropic’s ART discovery, since it’s close to the work we do: The biology is intriguing. In phages, an unusual reverse transcriptase sits next to a partner gene and an array of DNA repeats. The team found that the array produces distinct short RNAs. It’s tempting to compare this with CRISPR or retrons, but we don’t yet know what ART does. Whether the RNAs guide anything, or whether the system is programmable, remains an open question. I’m just as interested in how they found it. About 950 Claude agent sessions ran over 21 hours, surveyed ~200,000 reverse transcriptases, and produced 19 reports. One agent looked at the DNA next to an RT and spotted a repeat array outside the features the search had set out to examine. It followed that observation, compared it with known systems, checked the literature, and gave the scientists something concrete to investigate. To me, that’s the opportunity: scaling scientific attention. We have more biological data than any team can inspect closely. Agents can help us notice the odd cases and show their work. There’s still reason to be careful. Repeat-rich regions in assembled phage genomes can be tricky, so I’d want to see raw read support across the arrays and their boundaries in independent isolates. And the most important experiment is still ahead: what does ART actually do? I think discovery will become a tighter loop. Agents propose hypotheses, predictive models help choose experiments, and automated labs generate results that inform the next round. We’re working toward that at @Xaira_Thera, bringing agentic workflows together with models such as X-Cell and wet lab experiments. I’m excited by how much more biology we may be able to explore when each experiment helps us decide what to test next.