Automated scientific discovery

Technique · AI for Science · 3 items since May 2026

AI systems that form hypotheses and design or run experiments in the natural sciences.

Trends

Sep 23
Claude agents discover a CRISPR-like enzyme
In Anthropic's new life-sciences lab, roughly 950 Claude agents autonomously mined genomic data (210M tokens, 21 hours) to identify "array-associated reverse transcriptases" (ART), a previously uncharacterized and potentially programmable enzyme system, released as a preprint.
Jun 22
CMU limits agents' role in causal discovery
Argues agents should inspect data, retrieve context, and explain assumptions but never supply edges, priors, or causal conclusions, building the principle into the causal-learn+ platform so LLM unreliability is not laundered into causal evidence.
May 19
Google DeepMind's Co-Scientist published in Nature
Seven specialized agents rank thousands of hypotheses in an Elo tournament; lab-validated hits include a liver fibrosis repurposing candidate that blocked 91% of a scarring response, and the system is deployed with Daiichi Sankyo, Bayer Crop Science, and US National Laboratories.