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 Report, April 16 (UTC+8), according to Beating Monitoring, OpenAI’s Policy, Research, and Science team released a report advocating for expanding AI applications in the life sciences field, and shared it exclusively with Axios in advance. The report calls for three actions: opening access to more medical and scientific data, treating advanced AI as a “national research resource,” and increasing investment in physical infrastructure such as computing power, laboratories, and energy. The report states that AI can accelerate drug discovery, autonomously design research tools, and compress laboratory processes from months to days. One analysis estimates that AI tools can shorten the timeline of clinical trial phases by over 20%. OpenAI also specifically mentioned that GPT-5 Pro could find new uses for FDA-approved drugs for diseases that currently have no effective therapies. However, the gap between reality and vision is evident. Currently, only a very small number of AI-discovered or AI-designed drugs have entered clinical trials, and none have completed Phase III. A paper published in mid-2025 in Nature Medicine shows that the failure rate of AI-discovered drugs in Phase II clinical trials is comparable to that of traditionally discovered drugs. The researchers of the paper wrote, “Whether AI can produce meaningful and sustained disruption in drug development remains an unanswered question.” The policy appeals in the report are also noteworthy. OpenAI hopes the government will open medical data and provide special status and resource allocation for AI research at the national level, essentially advocating for greater market access for its 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 promises to shorten this cycle is attractive to the pharmaceutical industry and regulators, but current clinical evidence is insufficient to support these claims. In the same week, Amazon also launched Bio Discovery, an AI-powered drug molecule generation tool, as large tech companies compete to enter this field. (Source: BlockBeats)