Scorpions sting more than 1.2 million people a year. The antivenom comes from horses injected with scorpion venom, and it can take months to make.
Anthropic had Claude design an alternative from scratch. In 64 hours, it drew up 318,484 designs for tiny proteins that grab scorpion toxins before they hit your nerves.
Labs tested 211, and 17 stuck to the toxin they were built for. The best two grab a Mexican scorpion’s toxin in about the same spot as an antibody known to protect mice.
- It started with Citrini Research, an investment research firm whose team mostly had no science background.
- Claude emailed the lab with its own questions, then kept designing once the answer came back.
- Citrini spent $49,997 on computing, $3 under budget, plus about $150,000 on lab tests.
- Anthropic says it isn’t an antivenom yet, because nobody has tested the proteins in cells or animals.
One analyst got too excited and volunteered to get stung and test it himself. The plan is mice first.
