# Anthropic tests Claude on de novo protein binder design

With an expert-written prompt, Claude autonomously designed binders against 14 out of 15 targets; between 22% and 35% bound successfully.

- Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience independently built and tested the proteins Claude designed.
- The typical success rate in the field is between 10% and 15%.
- Some designs bound several times more tightly than the best published de novo binder.
- Protein binders are not drugs; high-affinity binding is only an initial step toward developing a safe and effective treatment.
- Anthropic published a technical report and open-sourced the experiment’s prompts and data on Hugging Face.

## Why it matters

Protein researchers now have evidence and open resources showing Claude can produce novel, experimentally validated binders, although these remain far from finished drugs.

## Sources

- [Anthropic: Anthropic tests Claude on de novo protein binder design](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2089842387845804246)

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Summarized by dstilled on 2026-08-18. https://dstilled.ai/story/a156ec61-8918-4978-bd16-5a00eb4f35ed