A.I./Robotics

Whatever your take on the current AI wave, it is clear that the prospect of creating software has been transformed. “The most impressive edge of it is probably using [genAI models] to help speed code development. And that’s kind of working,” said the computer scientist Jaron Lanier recently. Frontier AI labs are now pushing for…

Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) developed a generative agentic AI that can translate experimental goals into instructions for a laboratory robot. Their paper was published in Scientific Reports.   Gihan Panapitiya, a data scientist at PNNL and the lead author of the paper, said the researchers had plans to extend AutoLabs to literature review, persistent memory and other autonomous lab equipment besides the automated lab workstation Big Kahuna…

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is arguably the most influential LLM to launch in recent memory, marking the biggest leap in capabilities since Opus 4.5 debuted in November 2025. The publicly available counterpart to Claude Mythos Preview, which had a sizable jump in capabilities, most notably, in cybersecurity, Claude Fable featured stronger agentic performance and markedly…

Brookhaven National Laboratory says its GridSearch AI system could cut grid simulations from months to minutes as DOE targets 20–100× faster grid decision-making. Speaking at the recent Genesis Mission Annual Summit, an event dedicated to the U.S. government’s AI-focused initiative that aims to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a…

Clinical trials are notoriously difficult to predict, and they have grown more so as protocols pile on endpoints, procedures and eligibility rules. As that complexity climbs, so do the odds of studies needing mid-course changes. The share of Phase 1 through 4 protocols requiring at least one amendment hit 76%, up from 57% in 2015,…

Establishing causal relationships in plant-microbe studies can be exceptionally difficult, as it requires juggling sterility, standardization and manual labor. A single contaminant or inconsistent measurement can render weeks of work unusable. For example, one study on the effects of plant genotype and soil microbiome on growth in Lotus japonicus found that 15% of variability in shoot length was due to variability in the…

China has done it again. They have launched a new AI model that comes close to the frontier roughly a year and a half after Hangzhou, China–based Deepseek launched R1, a model that was roughly tied with OpenAI’s then frontier model o1. Now, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, released yesterday, follows a similar template while matching…

Tecan’s latest bet is on agents. The Swiss lab automation company has built agentic AI into Introspect, its cloud analytics platform, using NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, in an announcement on June 24 that opened early access to pharmaceutical, biotech and clinical labs. The agents watch instrument telemetry and environmental data, hunt for the patterns that…

Within roughly 18 months, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic have all launched or upgraded products aimed at scientific research, many of them built around AI agents that promise to compress the earliest, most expensive stages of discovery. That push builds on the explosive growth of AI coding tools. Even as many frontier…

When Becton, Dickinson and Company launched its Incada Connected Care Platform in October 2025 with the next-generation Pyxis Pro dispensing system, it framed the move as a way to turn data from nearly 3 million smart connected BD devices into actionable insights on medication inventory, waste and clinician workflows. Omar Ahmed, who joined BD as…

ViewsML, the Vancouver-based company developing what it calls the world’s first virtual biomarker library, closed an oversubscribed $4.9 million seed round earlier this year. Wittington Ventures, the Toronto venture arm of the Weston family holding company, led the round. New investors Mayo Clinic and Continuum Health Ventures participated alongside repeat backers including Debiopharm. In an…

2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. But 2026 arguably deserves that title. Adoption is climbing fast. One vendor tracking agent-building across 20,000 organizations found multi-agent systems grew 327% in under four months. Everyone from startups to big tech is shipping agents and agentic frameworks, including for science. Elsevier’s LeapSpace, which…

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says he doesn’t write prompts for Claude anymore. “My job is to write loops,” the head of Claude Code at Anthropic has said, describing a shift away from manual, turn-by-turn prompting toward building small systems that keep an agent working until a defined condition is met. Peter Steinberger,…

As Anthropic’s Fable 5 remains pulled from public access under a U.S. government export-control directive, OpenAI soft-launched GPT-5.6 Sol on June 26 to its own “trusted partners.” OpenAI boasted that 5.6 is its strongest model yet and led with a coding result, a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the benchmark that scores…

Many patients who receive cancer immunotherapy do not respond to it, and oncologists still have few dependable ways to know in advance who will. By one estimate, only about 13% of all U.S. cancer patients stand to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, and drugmakers are increasingly betting on AI to improve those odds. Noetik, a South…

When Eli Lilly and NVIDIA unveiled what they called the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer in October 2025, the story was mostly about scale. The Lilly-owned system, now branded LillyPod, brings more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into a DGX SuperPOD designed to support drug discovery, manufacturing, medical imaging and enterprise AI agents. At January’s…

Since AlphaFold 2 cracked protein-structure prediction in 2020 and 2021, a growing ecosystem of biomolecular models has followed, including Boltz, Chai, OpenFold and Protenix. Yet commercial access remains uneven. AlphaFold 3, launched in 2024, broadened the field from protein folding to biomolecular interactions, while its public server remains off-limits for commercial use. DeepMind’s commercial engine…

NVIDIA has unveiled the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open, harness-agnostic platform that gives AI agents or software platforms the building blocks to specialize for science. Debuting with adoption from nearly 50 partners, including Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dassault Systèmes, the toolkit packages NVIDIA’s life-sciences software, models for tasks such as protein-structure prediction, molecular…

OpenAI and Molecule.one have announced a system that improved a reaction medicinal chemists rely on but have long struggled to run reliably. OpenAI billed the news as a “near-autonomous AI chemist.” The setup paired one of OpenAI’s frontier models, GPT-5.4, with Maria, Molecule.one’s agentic chemistry AI, and an automated high-throughput lab. The chemistry target was…

Over the past decade and a half, the Darmstadt-based Merck KGaA has assembled a supplier that touches nearly every bench in the lab. It bought Millipore in 2010, with the membrane filters and Milli-Q water systems that had been lab staples since the 1950s, and added Sigma-Aldrich and its ubiquitous reagents catalog in 2015 for…

Over the past year, the AI-eats-software camp, which includes sell-side strategists at Jefferies and, more cautiously, analysts at Bain, has warned that generative AI could eat into the seat-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In some respects, those fears have been justified. After Anthropic released plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent earlier in 2026,…

In January 2024, Medable, the decentralized clinical-trial company headquartered in Palo Alto, used AI to translate a study protocol directly into a configured eCOA mobile app, complete with questionnaires, workflows and translation into roughly 25 languages. The company said then the feature could halve eCOA deployment timelines, which had typically run 12 to 16 weeks.…

A blog post from the AI image company announced the launch of a whole-body ultrasound scanner users would step into through a pool of water. “We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies,” the company noted. The “Ultrasonic CT” will be featured in…

Days after going public, SpaceX has reached a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion, even with its stock skidding in midday trading on June 17. At the time of writing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was worth more than the next four billionaires on Earth combined. SpaceX laid out its vision weeks ago in its S-1,…

Over the past two years, software engineering has handed a growing share of its routine work to AI agents. At one end of the spectrum, companies ranging from Google to Anthropic use AI to write the bulk of their code. At the other, there are reports of the bills coming due for heavy users at…