A.I./Robotics

Atomis, a Japanese startup advised by 2025 Nobel laureate Susumu Kitagawa, is bringing Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) to applications such as CO2 capture, refrigerant recycling and next-generation deodorization and coatings. One tool they are using to accomplish this is an AI-powered simulation platform from Matlantis.  MOFs have struggled to move beyond the lab due to…

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8 this week, and Artificial Analysis reports that it narrowly tops the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, compared with 60.2 for GPT-5.5 (xhigh). In Anthropic’s announcement for the model, Opus 4.8 looks mostly like an incremental upgrade over 4.7, but the company noted that its heavily-promoted Mythos model would…

A recent video from a popular software developer–based content creator pokes fun at the at times unreliable nature of AI coding agents. At the beginning of the clip, a screen shows a blue circle with the text “coding then.” She wants it green, opens the file, edits one line, and it turns green. Then later,…

San Francisco-based OpenAI is launching Rosalind Biodefense, a program that sponsors vetted outside developers’ access to GPT-Rosalind, its gated life-sciences model, so they can build pandemic-preparedness and biosecurity tools. Alongside it, the company is opening GPT-Rosalind itself to select U.S. government and allied partners running public-health and biodefense missions. On background, OpenAI says it briefed…

In the span of a couple of months this spring, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Benchling and a handful of startups all shipped products using some version of “AI scientist” or “co-scientist” branding. They mean fundamentally different things. Google’s Co-Scientist is a coalition of six specialized AI agents that debate and rank hypotheses in an Elo-based tournament,…

A growing number of vendors, from Google DeepMind to Benchling to traditional ELN companies like Sapio Sciences, are pitching “co-scientist” functionality to bench researchers. They are part of a multibillion-dollar wave of AI life-sciences deals that has accelerated since late 2025. To cite but a few examples, OpenAI introduced GPT-Rosalind and named Amgen, Moderna, and…

Over the past few years, consulting firms and vendors have urged life science organizations to reinvent their operations with generative AI and, more recently, with semi-autonomous agents. A February 2026 Pharmaphorum analysis by NVIDIA’s David Ruau predicted that AI scientists would become “essential collaborators” embedded across the research lifecycle as 2026 progresses. The transition remains…

The modern pharmaceutical industry is navigating an era of rapid scientific progress, yet it remains constrained by a fundamentally inefficient development pipeline. Bringing a single new drug to market takes an average of 12 years and costs nearly $3 billion.1 Roughly 90% of drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail to achieve regulatory approval,2 often…

In the span of several weeks this spring, every major frontier AI lab and cloud hyperscaler formally declared pharma R&D a core vertical. In April, OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, its frontier reasoning model series built for life sciences research, biology, and drug discovery. The ChatGPT developer also announced a significant partnership with Novo Nordisk that same…

Google’s Gemini 3 triggered a Code Red at OpenAI last December and briefly seized the frontier narrative. Roughly half a year later, the AI model race had mostly become a two-company contest between Anthropic and OpenAI with Claude and GPT trading the top spots on independent leaderboards. Meanwhile, Google’s developer tools steadily lost ground to…

Anthropic hired Andrej Karpathy to its pretraining team on Tuesday and is winding down Stainless, the $300 million SDK startup it also acquired recently. That latter move cuts off tooling that rivals OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare relied on. Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, served as director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, and in…

The market for industrial robot installations has never been worth more, even as North American robot orders remained flat in early 2026. Industrial robot installations alone hit a record $16.7 billion in market value in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics, with Asia (74% of deployments) and China in particular driving the totals.…

Instead of Spy vs. Spy, the cybersecurity world is quickly becoming AI vs. AI. Anthropic is positioning its gated Claude Mythos Preview model as offering a “striking leap” in many evaluation benchmarks over its predecessor, which at the time of launch was Opus 4.6. Most recently, Cloudflare Chief Security Officer Grant Bourzikas reported that Mythos…

RLWRLD, a Seoul-founded startup backed by KAIST researchers, is making a simple pitch across manufacturing, logistics and hospitality: let us replace human hands with robot ones. At the company’s “Dexterity Night” launch event in San Francisco, CEO Junghee Ryu said his team has met with more than 200 large companies and heard the same thing…

Companies from Palantir to Salesforce to Veeva are racing to speed up regulatory workflows with AI agents, as is a wave of startups targeting everything from clinical document generation to pharmacovigilance case processing. Meanwhile, many large pharmas are pursuing a build-and-compose strategy of their own, stitching AI into existing regulatory systems, validated workflows and company-specific…

Say you are in the market for form-fitted clothing for a special event. Off the rack won’t do, and your tailoring requests are demanding: structural alterations, unusual fabrics, tight deadline. Some tailors might balk at the request. Others might take your measurements, feed them into the system and tell you the job can’t be done.…

At Sandia National Laboratories, inspecting ceramic components destined for nuclear deterrence applications traditionally meant lots of manual work. Inspectors would sit at a microscope for up to an hour per part where they would scan every surface for hairline cracks, chips and voids that could compromise performance. Training a single operator on the manual process…

AI can help scientists accelerate their research, run powerful simulations and gather insights from vast amounts of data. However, these tools may not be up to the caliber needed for scientific papers. Recent studies have found thousands of papers featuring fake citations and other errors, likely from the use of AI. One study found that…

The past week or so, Anthropic’s gated Mythos model remains a news fixture, drawing White House policy attention, a Mozilla proof point and a somewhat skeptical review from an open-source project. Earlier this month, OpenAI had formalized a split between general-purpose and cyber-specific model access while Anthropic opted for a more reserved gated release for…

Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the company’s Llama language model was trained on datasets containing unauthorized copies of academic papers and literary works.  Elsevier claims that Meta used illicit repositories like Sci-Hub and LibGen to source the copyrighted text. The eventual ruling of this case could establish a critical legal…

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed AI drug design company led by Sir Demis Hassabis, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for their work on the protein structure prediction platform AlphaFold, announced a $2.1 billion Series B on May 12. The total outside capital raised to date is about $2.6 billion. Thrive Capital…

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an AI agent, LLMB, designed to accelerate the development-validation cycle of lithium metal batteries (LMBs). They published their work in ACS Central Science, and the agent is available in a GitHub repository. LLMB integrates a large language model for hierarchical text mining with…

Last April, Firefox patched 31 security vulnerabilities. For most of the year, the number hovered between the teens and the mid-twenties. The numbers began to tick up after, in January 2026, Anthropic partnered with Mozilla and deployed its Claude Opus 4.6 model to scan Firefox over a two-week period. That month, the model discovered 22…

In January, Anthropic banned xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, from using its Claude models. The company says it discovered that xAI engineers had been running Claude through the coding tool Cursor to accelerate their own development, aviolation of Anthropic’s terms of service. In February, Musk fired back, calling the company “misanthropic and evil.” Musk declared…

The speed of AI innovation is outpacing the evolution of regulatory frameworks like the FDA and EMA.  “By the time we create the law, the technology has already surpassed us along the way. And it’s getting faster and faster,” said Thomas Carganico, vice president of Marketing Strategy at PQE Group, a global consulting firm specializing…