Last week, Anthropic confirmed that it was operating a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it uses its AI models to run physical experiments. This week, the AI giant announced that this lab has already made what it believes is a big discovery: a new enzyme “system” that has certain “properties reminiscent of CRISPR,” as Anthropic describes it.

CRISPR is a natural immune system used by bacteria to fight off viruses that has become a gene-editing technology widely used by researchers.

Essentially, what Anthropic says it found is a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria. Anthropic’s researchers say this system behaves similarly to CRISPR in that it can “perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA.”

It will be up to the broader research community to validate how big, or new, this discovery actually is. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledges that the discovery was based on the previous work of others and that a team from Stanford previously discovered a system “that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found,” he wrote on X.

But Amodei and Anthropic are not just emphasizing the discovery. They are touting it was found “mostly, though not entirely, by Claude,” the CEO wrote.

On the one hand, that is astounding. This lab was only established this spring, (though Anthropic declined to be more specific about how many months it has been open). A discovery in just a few short months would be speedy enough work, but the team said it actually only took Claude 21 hours of concerted effort. Claude searched through data using about 950 agents that burned through 210 million tokens.

Still, the revelation that Anthropic has been conducting biology experiments comes right after AI CEOs, including Amodei, publicly admitted that models have become so capable, and so potentially dangerous, that the industry must slow down and develop safety-testing procedures. This after a couple of his employees publicly said earlier this month that there’s a risk AI could kill us all.

Amodei himself has said one of the things he fears most its that AI could be used for bioterrorism. But he also believes AI will “cure most diseases in 5-10 years,” he wrote. So Anthropic has clearly decided the rewards are worth the risks.

Given that, perhaps the biggest reveal in this news isn’t the discovery itself, but that the biology lab hasn’t let Claude loose. The physical experiments were done by humans.

“Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists.”

It’s also true that AI-powered biological research is hardly unique to Anthropic. Researchers from Stanford just published a paper on the work they are doing with LLMs and CRISPR. Researchers at UC San Francisco used AI to design enzymes from scratch. Google launched its first AI-powered biology research tool, AlphaFold, back in 2020. So AI has clearly arrived in biological research beyond the AI labs pursuing it themselves.

Yet, Amodei hasn’t ruled out a fully automated biology lab in the future. “Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today,” he said.

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Amazon’s chief sustainability officer said Tuesday the company doesn’t know how it will achieve its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2040.

“We are still striving towards that target,” Kara Hurst said at an Axios event, adding later that she is “not going to sit here and say, ‘We know all the ways that we’re going to do this.’”

The admission was both frank and realistic. It’s also a bit disappointing. If Amazon doesn’t have a plan to decarbonize, then who does?

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, with last year’s revenue up 12% to $717 billion — about the size of Ireland’s economy. Its rise is illustrative of how, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has pointed out, power has shifted from governments to a few corporations.

As power moves, responsibility follows. The question is, how much responsibility does Amazon bear?

“This isn’t a question of companies versus governments,” Hurst told TechCrunch in a written reply to questions after the event. “Tackling climate change at the scale it demands takes both, and it takes them working together.” She added, “Where we can lead, we do.”

It’s true that Amazon has not been sitting still. In her talk yesterday, Hurst pointed out that the company is “one of the largest purchasers of clean energy in the world for the last several years running” with 42 gigawatts in its portfolio. She also said that Amazon has reduced its carbon intensity, or how much pollution it generates per dollar of revenue, though that claim depends on the timeframe. Last year, carbon intensity rose compared with 2024, even though it stayed below where it was in 2022.

Amazon is a sprawling business, and as a result, its carbon emissions are spread across nearly every sector of the economy, from aviation and AI to agriculture and construction. The company needs suppliers in every sector to achieve its goal. “This is not something we can do alone,” Hurst said at the Axios event.

The company acknowledges that its commitments are its own. “We hold ourselves accountable to The Climate Pledge goal of net-zero carbon by 2040. That commitment hasn’t changed,” Hurst told TechCrunch.

But Amazon has also made choices that undermine its leadership on the issue. Earlier this year, an investigation revealed the company’s plans to build a 7.65 gigawatt natural gas power plant to power an AI data center campus. The project’s 35 turbines could release up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, making it the largest single source of that pollution in the U.S.

With few exceptions, companies prioritize revenue growth over climate commitments. For a company like Amazon, which operates the largest cloud service in the world, AI is apparently a revenue driver that’s impossible to pass up.

The climate tech world has been hoping that, as clean power gets cheaper, the market would work its magic to lower carbon emissions. There have been a few success stories, but as the AI rush has shown, that approach has its limits. Even Amazon, one of the leaders in the space, bet big on natural gas. In the process, it essentially said that climate change is something for future generations of executives to deal with. Sound familiar?