Claude 950-Agent Swarm: Build a Funnel in Python

On September 24, Anthropic published a write-up that spread fast: about 950 Claude agents ran for 21 hours, burned roughly 210 million tokens, and turned up a previously undescribed enzyme system in bacteriophage genomes. Anthropic calls it array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART): a reverse transcriptase, a partner gene, and evenly spaced DNA repeats that look a bit like a CRISPR array. Its function is still unknown, and the result is a preprint that hasn't been peer reviewed.

The biology is the headline. The part you can steal is the shape of the workload. Anthropic's own numbers describe a funnel: 200,000+ reverse transcriptases pulled from public databases, about 3,500 candidate systems, 20 worth a human-readable report, and 1 that went to the lab. Most of the agents did cheap, wide, disposable work. Only a handful of expensive judgments happened at the end.