According to Tom's Hardware, Exin Therapeutics co-founder and CEO Gabriel Ocana-Santero described the experiment on X on October 28. The agent was given a spreadsheet of 19 gene therapy vectors, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorized surgery rig with cameras, three research papers and one goal: reduce seizures. It chose the therapy and the brain region, derived the coordinates, drove the stereotaxic arms and injected 250 nanolitres while watching for bleeding through the rig camera.
A licensed veterinarian oversaw the operation, every irreversible step required approval, and an emergency stop cut power to all the motors. The veterinarian performed the craniotomy, which the agent was not allowed to do. According to the report, the team first tried Claude Opus 5.5, which refused to work once it detected a biological experiment; Opus 5 planned the procedure on paper but refused to perform live surgery, so the team used Sonnet.
"I am not aware of an agent previously choosing a treatment and a brain target and then delivering it into a living mammal," Ocana-Santero wrote. These are the company's claims only: the experiment has not been published as peer-reviewed research, and the company has promised a full write-up later. It has drawn criticism over accountability and the ethics of animal experiments.