Claude designed 17 lab-confirmed binders against scorpion toxins

Anthropic asked an internal research model, running in Claude Science, to design small proteins that bind to scorpion neurotoxins. Over 64 hours, working mostly on its own with four follow-up prompts, it generated 318,484 designs and picked 180; the team added 31 more with Claude's help. Two contract labs, Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience, tested all 211, and 17 met Anthropic's criteria for a binder, each against a single toxin. None of the designs meant to hit several toxins worked on more than one. The campaign used on the order of 10,000 GPU hours. Anthropic says this is not an antivenom, since no design was tested for neutralising the toxin in cells or in animals, and it is releasing all 211 designs and their data. On Hacker News (88 points, 14 top-level comments) there is no consensus. Some were impressed or hopeful, including a parent whose child was stung by a bark scorpion. Sceptics said the model mainly orchestrated existing open-source design tools, and one said he ran a similar setup at home on a single GPU against a different target. Others asked for peer review, questioned whether binder design is the real bottleneck next to trials and funding, or pointed to a 2025 study of designed snake antivenom that was tested in mice. Sorted take: read this as an agent workflow story more than a drug story. A model ran a long, multi-tool research pipeline with light steering, and outside labs checked the output. Anthropic says the 18% hit rate on single-toxin designs is typical for the field, so the gain shown here is speed and autonomy, not better designs.