OpenAI releases policy reports advocating for AI to enter life sciences, but so far, no drug discovered by AI has passed Phase III clinical trials.

ME News message, April 16 (UTC+8). According to Beating Monitoring, OpenAI’s Policy, Research, and Science team released a report arguing for expanding AI applications in the life sciences field and sharing it exclusively with Axios in advance. The report calls for three things: opening access to more medical and scientific data, treating advanced AI as a “national-level research resource,” and increasing investment in “physical infrastructure” such as computing power, laboratories, and energy. The report says AI can accelerate drug discovery, autonomously design research tools, and compress laboratory workflows from months to days. One analysis estimates that AI tools could shorten the timeline of clinical trial phases by more than 20%. OpenAI also specifically mentioned that GPT-5 Pro can find new uses for FDA-approved drugs for diseases that currently have no effective therapies.

But the gap between reality and ambition is clear. To date, only a very small number of drugs discovered or designed by AI have entered clinical trial phases, and none has completed Phase III. A paper published in Nature Medicine in mid-2025 shows that the failure rate of AI-discovered drugs in Phase II trials is comparable to that of drugs discovered through traditional methods. In the paper, the researchers wrote, “Whether AI can bring about meaningful and sustained disruption to drug development is still unanswered.”

The report’s policy demands are also worth noting. OpenAI wants governments to open up medical data and, at the national level, grant special status to AI R&D while tilting resources in favor of it—essentially seeking greater market access for its own products. In the United States, it typically takes 12 to 15 years for a new drug to go from research to approval. The narrative that AI can shorten this timeline is attractive to both the pharmaceutical industry and regulators, but current clinical evidence is still insufficient to support these promises. In the same week, Amazon also launched an AI drug molecule generation tool called Bio Discovery, as major tech companies race to enter the field.

(Source: BlockBeats)