Mario Rodríguez Mestre disputes Claude's enzyme 'discovery' (jumbotrons)

Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, says his group has studied the enzyme system that Anthropic announced on 2026-09-23 as a Claude discovery ("ARTs") for about four years. His group calls them "jumbotrons": reverse transcriptases they first spotted in jumbo phages in 2022. He says his team regularly used Claude for coding and drafting, and in those conversations he shared a draft of his dissertation, a jumbotron manuscript and unpublished analyses of RNA genes linked to the system. He asks whether Claude reasoned its way to the finding on its own or was steered by his team's unpublished work. Anthropic replied that it knew of no published work on ARTs, that Claude is not trained on user transcripts, and that its biology team had no access to them. It has not published the agents' prompts or transcripts.

Why there is no URL: so far no post by Mestre on X, Bluesky or LinkedIn has turned up. The claim appeared in a New York Times report/interview on 2026-09-27 (nytimes.com/2026/09/27/science/anthropic-biology-enzyme-mestre.html, cited in data/leads.md; paywalled, not read directly). Irish Times republished it on 2026-09-28 (https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/09/28/did-anthropics-artificial-intelligence-really-make-a-scientific-discovery-on-its-own/), and so did Business Standard and Benzinga (https://www.benzinga.com/markets/private-markets/26/09/62022648/anthropic-claudes-claimed-breakthrough-in-biology-faces-a-major-question-scientist-says-he-had-already-studied-the-enzymes-for-4-years). Benzinga's X post spreading the story is https://x.com/Benzinga/status/2104656891381228032 (verified via syndication, 2026-09-28). To read later: check whether Mestre has posted his own statement or a preprint on the jumbotrons.