Wednesday, 21 October 2026
Claude Designed Proteins Against Scorpion Toxins, and 17 of 211 Bound in the Lab
Claude Designed Proteins Against Scorpion Toxins, and 17 of 211 Bound in the Lab
Scorpion antivenom is still made the old way, in horses, and it is often scarce where the stings happen. Anthropic published an experiment on Tuesday that aims at a different route. An internal research model inside Claude Science was asked to design minibinders — small proteins that grip a toxin and hold it — against five scorpion toxins from Mexico, Brazil, North Africa and the Middle East. Working mostly on its own for about 64 hours, it generated 318,484 designs with twelve tools and used roughly 10,000 GPU hours. Claude picked 180, the team added 31, and two contract labs tested all 211. Seventeen met the bar: seven against the Mexican toxin Cn2, four each against two North African ones, two against a Middle Eastern one. The best two bound at single-digit nanomolar strength, near the spot where an antibody known to neutralise Cn2 in mice binds. The caveats are Anthropic’s own: only lab-made toxin was tested, nothing was tried in cells or animals, designs meant to catch several toxins at once all failed, and “we do not claim to have produced an antivenom.” All 211 designs and the lab data are public. Eighteen percent hits for single-toxin designs is, the report says, ordinary for protein design — the unusual part is who did the designing.
Source: Anthropic, October 20, 2026
OpenAI Buys Orchestra Bio, Whose Agents Keep Drug Development on Schedule
The same day, OpenAI bought Orchestra Bio, a San Francisco startup whose AI agents do the unglamorous half of drug development: tracking studies, money and trial schedules. When a failed manufacturing batch threatens a clinical trial, the software works out which steps and dates slip and weighs the options; people still make the call. The team joins Rosalind, OpenAI’s life-sciences unit, where Moderna and Novo Nordisk already use its biology model. Orchestra had raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC and Insight; the price was not disclosed, and OpenAI gave no date for when the agents reach its products. Anthropic reportedly paid about $400 million for the biotech startup Coefficient Bio in April. Both labs now want to own not only the discovery but the paperwork after it — which, in drug development, is where most of the years go.
Source: SiliconANGLE, October 20, 2026
US Homeland Security Orders DeepSeek Removed From Civilian Agencies’ Computers
The US Department of Homeland Security has ordered DeepSeek out of the federal government’s civilian IT. The notice, published in the Federal Register on Tuesday under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, does two things: it bars civilian agencies from buying products and services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and its affiliates, and it orders all DeepSeek products removed from their systems. The removal also covers third-party products “developed using DeepSeek implementations” — so a tool someone else built on DeepSeek’s openly published model counts too. That clause is the wide one: open weights travel, and agencies now have to find where they went. The notice is signed by DHS General Counsel James H. Percival II; the signed order itself sits in an appendix, and the notice gives no removal deadline.
Source: Federal Register / US Department of Homeland Security, October 20, 2026