OpenAI Buys Drug-Development AI Startup as Science Rivalry With Anthropic Heats Up

OpenAI has bought a drug-development AI startup, and the deal comes as its science rivalry with Anthropic intensifies. The text available here does not name the startup or give the price or terms, so the clearest detail concerns how the two companies approach science.

OpenAI leans on partnerships with major pharmaceutical players, including Novo Nordisk, Moderna and Amgen, and on benchmark scores. That positions it more as a tool for researchers than as the source of a discovery. Anthropic has gone further out on a limb. It has built its own biological research lab and presented its Claude model as having independently discovered a new enzyme, which exposed the company to scientific scrutiny and dispute.

Scientific reaction to the enzyme claim was split. CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang called it "genuinely interesting" and worth a deeper look. Philip Kranzusch of Harvard Medical School and Steven Salzberg of Johns Hopkins argued it was too early to call it a breakthrough.

Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, added a Danish angle. He said his team had studied the same enzyme family since 2022 and questioned whether Claude had reasoned its way to the finding independently.

The contrast matters because the two leading AI labs are taking different bets in life sciences: one on industry partnerships and measurable performance, the other on claiming discoveries of its own, with the credibility risks that brings.