Musk, Bezos, Amodei, Nadella and more, all present on command: last week saw an extraordinary display of power think of it as the King summoning his barons to the castle to tell them: Don’t Forget I’m Still the Boss I get into what it means in this week's instalment of The Download

This week's instalment of The Download newsletter is live! Here's the lead story... Anthropic recently announced a new molecular biology research group, complete with its own ‘wet lab’. It hasn’t taken long to see results. This week, the team announced that they’d set 950 Claude agents loose for 21 hours. And the agents came back with a biological system no human has spotted, which looks to be a cousin of the gene editing system CRISPR. CRISPR exists naturally as a defence system that bacteria use to fight viruses. When a virus attacks, the CRISPR system saves a small piece of the virus’s DNA, so that if the virus comes back it can recognise that virus and cut it up. But about a decade ago, scientists realised that they could use the CRISPR system as a kind of programmable pair of scissors, able to find and edit almost any gene. These Claude agents hunted through more than 200,000 enzymes and found a structure that looks strikingly like CRISPR. When it found the pattern, one of the agents exclaimed that it was ‘…spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that’s a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!’ Anthropic are being transparent about the limitations here: no one knows yet what this new system can do, or whether it can edit genes. But no less a scientist than MIT professor Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR genome editing, said: This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation. I hope this work encourages more scientists to explore how AI can support their research. ⚡️ The Download: A while back we saw software stocks bouncing around every time Anthropic announced a new plug-in or design tool. Are we going to see a similar phenomenon in life sciences and other stocks, driven by AI-fuelled science? In truth, as Anthropic have made clear, it’s too early to say anything meaningful about the scientific, and market, implications of this particular discovery. But if it does turn out to have the makings of another major gene editing platform, that is huge. For now, the news is a powerful signal of the kind of future that is ahead. One in which AI operates at the knowledge frontier, generating new insights at what feels like lightspeed. The feeling — and it’s already one we’re having to get used to — is going to be one of insane scientific and cultural acceleration. Seen through the lens of the Universal Code, this is AI becoming the compression layer for science. The framework says intelligence advances by compressing the world into patterns: finding the signal hidden in the noise. That’s exactly what happened here. Claude looked at raw DNA and saw a pattern no human had noticed. And the loop is speeding up, because discoveries now feed back into the system faster as the intelligence doing the discovering keeps improving. That’s why it’s all starting to feel so fast. And what does this mean for us? Increasingly, our challenge will be to make sense of all these new insights and ideas, to sort the useful from the useless, and to try to understand their implications. I’m absolutely persuaded that there will still be plenty of human scientists. It just seems that human science will increasingly become about making sense of what the machines are trying to tell us.

Me waiting for GPT-6 while I write this month's essay for GMI