When can we say AI made a scientific discovery?

When can we say AI made a scientific discovery? AI companies' insistence that their technology is making breakthroughs, not just aiding scientists, is making real progress harder to recognize. Last Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scientists run experiments on what they report. And this AI-powered lab, the company said, had made its first discovery. To understand what Anthropic says its system did, imagine you're flipping through a library of millions of DNA sequences, amassed as scientists sequence more and more of the living world. One step toward a breakthrough might be finding a peculiar sequence that encodes an interesting enzyme, perhaps.