Anthropic expands Claude ecosystem with marketplace and biological discovery

Anthropic has announced two major developments involving its AI model, Claude. First, the company launched the Claude Marketplace, an ecosystem designed to expand Claude’s utility through over 2,000 connectors and plugins. This marketplace allows integration with major professional tools such as Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, and Salesforce. The system utilizes the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent Skills, enabling developers to create and register tools that allow Claude to access external data and perform tasks within various work environments.

In a separate scientific breakthrough, Anthropic’s internal life sciences team used Claude to discover a potential new enzyme system known as the Arrayed Related Reverse Transcriptase (ART) system. By deploying approximately 950 Claude agents to scan 210 million tokens of DNA sequence data over 21 hours, the AI identified 3,500 new candidate systems, eventually narrowing them down to 20 high-potential candidates.

The ART system features repetitive DNA sequences structurally similar to the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism. While the exact biological functions and biotechnological applications of ART are still being investigated through ongoing experiments, CEO Dario Amodei noted that the discovery could represent a new mechanism for gene editing. Experts, including MIT’s Feng Zhang, have described the achievement as an interesting example of AI agents contributing directly to biological discovery.