Matt Durrant

Thrilled to share that I have joined @AnthropicAI as a life science researcher! I am confident that Claude will do amazing things to accelerate biology. Big things ahead!

Questions my 5-year-old has asked in the past hour: - Does metal have water in it? - What is drool? - Why don’t bad guys kill kids in TV shows? - How do your eyes move? - How do you suffocate? - Is there air in space?

These vague posts about RSI are insufferable, but there really has been a step change with frontier agents. Here are some observations I've seen in 2026: - One of my former PhD students gave an agent an old ML paper we wrote and the agent trained a better model without intervention. - I was able to port my chemistry textbook from tensorflow to pytorch with minimal effort using claude code - I asked codex to convert a reveal.js presentation from HTML to PPTX and it did it with one correction. Not really research, but a task that I didn't even think was possible - Our internal roadmap at @EdisonSci no longer slips and we're sometimes completing projects early. Maybe we just got better at planning. - we've internally done things like autoresearch and found similarly that the proposed research ideas and execution are now compelling enough to just run without human intervention. - both opus 4.6 and 5.4 are able to browse the web much better and have the tenacity to do tasks like "visit every biotech with a TPD, download their pipeline, and add the indication area to a spreadsheet." - One of my PhD students was able to set-up GRPO training of a multi-turn reasoning model for relaxing crystal structures with a simulation as the reward function. This would normally require a research team and a lot of time, but he did this while managing a newborn and writing his thesis. - I also notice that the kind of code coming out of LLMs now is code I could never have written. Like its use of heredoc/variable expansion are beyond my CLI brain. Personally, these observations add up to a big change happening right now and we're on the precipice of some big changes in how research is done.

@PhD_Genie @_David_Li

Working on three projects at the same time

Not implying that AI won’t dramatically accelerate biology btw, but that excellence will always be rare (by definition). We’ll adjust to the new normal and raise our expectations accordingly.

@dextrodexter This is a recent example that i love from @mfgrp nature.com/articles/s4158…

@mgdurrant What’s the gold standard example of an excellent idea to you.

There will be no shortage of good ideas with AI-automated biology research, but there will always be a shortage of excellent ideas.

A statement from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: anthropic.com/news/where-sta…

Grateful to have been a part of this massive undertaking, and looking forward to the future of genomic language models!

I've decided to leave OpenAI. I'm incredibly proud of all the work I've been part of here, from helping create the reasoning paradigm with @MillionInt, scaling up test-time compute with @polynoamial, working on RL algorithms with my fellow strawberries, shipping o1-preview (which started life as of one of my derisking runs), to post-training o1 and o3 with @ericmitchellai, @yanndubs and many others. I'm most proud of having led the post-training team here for the last year -- the team has done incredible work and shipped some really smart models, including GPT-5, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3-Codex. OpenAI has genuinely some of the most talented researchers I have ever met, and I have learned more than I could have imagined knowing since I joined as a new grad. I want to thank @markchen90 @FidjiSimo @sama @merettm for all their support over my time here, and too many collaborators to name for the insights, ideas, and just plain fun we have had working together. After leading post-training for a year, though, I'm longing to start fresh and return to IC research work. I've been thinking about going back to technical research for quite some time, and I genuinely believe my colleagues and team here are set up to succeed going forward without me. I'm personally very excited for my next chapter -- I'm proud to be joining @AnthropicAI to get back into the weeds in RL research, and I'm looking forward supporting my friends there at this important time. Many of people I most trust and respect have joined Anthropic over the last couple of years, and I'm excited to work with them again. I have also been very impressed with Anthropic's talent, research taste and values, and I'm excited to be part of what the company does next!

Pearl and blue oyster mushrooms

I really enjoy using ChatGPT and think it is genuinely more useful than other chatbots for various tasks but I can't in good conscience keep paying for it. I downloaded my data and ended my pro account today. Claude makes it easy to import your memory over. I recommend that people make this switch. claude.com/import-memory

I switched my personal AI subscription from ChatGPT to Claude today. Anthropic (Claude parent company) has repeatedly shown that it cares more about responsible, ethical, and safe use of AI than the other leading AI companies.

@MelindaBChu1 I don’t think you know anything about me

I don’t think you’re actually patriotic; just thinking about your vesting which is in trouble now. Earlier today before they raised $110 billion, you would have been extremely happy if OpenAI went bankrupt and your bosses tried to coup OpenAI in 2023. According to your logic, the end of OpenAI would have been negative for NatSec, but you would have been happy.

I am a proud American, and I’m proud to work at Anthropic. Labeling Claude a supply chain risk will only harm America’s lead in AI. It’s not un-American to support AI guardrails that protect our civil liberties.

@BenjaminBuick I’d recommend you read Anthropic’s official statement. The moral case is made against mass domestic surveillance, which I assume you agree with.

@Jacobwpg @BenjaminBuick I don’t disagree with this at all

@mgdurrant @BenjaminBuick I think I understand your position. But I believe the US needs to use AI as they believe is necessary to learn from its use and practice integrating AI into its battle plans for foreign battlefields. This I believe is comparable to competing to build the first nuke.

@BenjaminBuick Claude is not built for autonomous weapons.

@vkhosla @AnthropicAI Claude is not ready for that

Personal view: I admire @AnthropicAI sticking by their principles but disagree with the principle itself. Putin won’t fight fair so we should have autonomous AI weapons for sure.

As I learned more about Anthropic and its mission, I came to see that it was different, that it was principled, and that its leadership had integrity. I hope this helps more people see that.