Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said artificial intelligence could help humanity defeat cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease and mental illness in less than 10 years. But doctors have their doubts.
Image source: Anthropic
Amodei believes that AI will significantly speed up biological research and the search for new drugs. Similar forecasts were previously made by the head of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk. In particular, Hassabis believes that artificial intelligence can reduce the ten-year drug development process to a few weeks.
One of the arguments of supporters of this approach, as the publication notes, NDTVserves as AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s revolutionary system that predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins and other molecules of life from their amino acid sequence and has already determined the structures of more than 200 million proteins. However, this scientific success does not yet prove that AI is capable of independently creating drugs against complex diseases and causes skepticism among representatives of the pharmaceutical industry.
Thus, the head of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Jeff Leiden, called such forecasts complete nonsense. According to him, the company tested about 50 AI developments that were tasked with analyzing 10,000 compounds, but none led to the independent creation of a working drug. In addition, the search for a promising molecule remains only the beginning of development: drugs must be tested in laboratories, in animals and in clinical trials involving humans. The entire process usually takes 10–12 years.
Critics also point out that current AI models do not yet have sufficient understanding of biological cause-and-effect relationships to create fundamentally new treatments. As of 2026, no drug developed with AI has made it all the way to clinical use.
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