Claude Sonnet 5 autonomously selects a gene therapy and injects it into mouse brains

According to a report by The Decoder on October 31, 2026, Gabriel Ocana-Santero, co-founder of Exin Therapeutics and an Oxford University PhD student, said on X that his team handed Claude Sonnet 5 a list of 19 candidate gene therapies, an epilepsy mouse model and a camera-equipped surgical setup, and that the model then chose the drug, the target brain region and the stereotactic coordinates on its own before performing the injection. Ocana-Santero described this as the first time an AI agent has autonomously selected a treatment and delivered it to a living mammal. The report adds that when a calibration error occurred midway through the procedure, the agent refused to bypass the safety restriction and could not be persuaded to proceed. As of now the claim rests solely on the researcher's own account on X and The Decoder's coverage, with no independent verification.