Let’s Talk About That Anthropic Preprint

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced they were setting up a “wet lab” for physical biology experiments. That was followed shortly by the release of a preprint via their own servers claiming to have discovered a CRISPR-like enzyme system.

No publisher, editorial office, outside expert, screener, or mediator was involved.

This is not new behavior, but the Anthropic approach is particularly galling for reasons I’ll outline below.

To quote from our book:

The practice of posting a commercially motivated preprint to generate buzz while never submitting evidence to a journal for scrutiny would become known as “publication by press release.”