Researchers published vConTACT3, a machine‑learning framework that enables multirank, large‑scale classification of eukaryotic and prokaryotic viruses, addressing taxonomic bottlenecks created by explosive genomic discovery. The tool, described in Nature Biotechnology, integrates scalable ML methods to resolve complex taxonomic relationships across viral genomes. vConTACT3 aims to standardize virus classification and accelerate discovery pipelines by providing hierarchical taxonomy outputs that can handle high volumes of metagenomic data. The platform helps virologists unify naming and lineage assignment across diverse viral clades, an important step for surveillance, phage therapy research and viral ecology. Adoption of vConTACT3 could shift how labs and consortia curate viral reference databases and deploy automated classification in outbreak and environmental genomics workflows.