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I read the phrase “Claude-shaped science” and immediately pictured a laboratory being remodeled around a chatbot’s preferences. The benches would be rearranged, the microscopes would receive motivational feedback, and someone with an expensive haircut would announce that curiosity had finally achieved product-market fit. I realize that is an unfair place to begin. Unfortunately, I have spent enough time around technology announcements to develop an involuntary twitch whenever a company’s product name starts attaching itself to a fundamental human activity. Then I read the actual piece, and something inconvenient happened: I found the central idea interesting. In his October 1 guest essay for Anthropic, physicist Matthew Schwartz describes building BootLoops, an open-source scientific toolkit, around problems that suit current AI capabilities. His account includes an important complication: technical achievements sometimes needed specialists to redirect them toward questions worth answe...