Anthropic CEO pitches IPO with claim AI will end cancer

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that some of medicine's hardest problems will be solved within 10 years. "Cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness, these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade," he said in the company's IPO roadshow video. The 42-minute video went out on Tuesday, Nov. 10, as the Claude maker began marketing its share sale to investors.ndtv.com+1

The forecast lands just as Anthropic asks Wall Street for money, and a week after drugmaker executives publicly rejected this kind of timeline. Anthropic is offering 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each and has applied to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol "ANT".anthropic.com

An "age of miracles"

Amodei tied the medical promise to his company's focus on safety. He said the company that "gets the risks right" will earn a "license to operate," and added: "If we do this right, we can create an age of miracles where humanity is able to solve problems that have eluded us for millennia". The disease timeline is a forecast made in the video. The company's amended prospectus sets no such target.fourweekmba.com

Amodei has made the argument before. He has said AI could cure "most human disease" in about five to 10 years by working as a "virtual biologist," though he has also admitted that testing cancer cures "may have an irreducible minimum" of time. Other AI leaders have made similar claims, including Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis. Hassabis has suggested AI could shrink a decade of drug discovery into weeks and has pointed to AlphaFold as evidence.finance.yahoo.com+1

Drugmakers push back

People who make medicines are not convinced. "That's complete BS," Jeff Leiden, executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, told The Wall Street Journal. He was recalling a tech leader who claimed AI would cure 90% of human disease within seven years. Leiden said Vertex had run its 10,000-compound library past about 50 AI companies, and none produced a working drug.wsj.com

AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said that "to say AI is going to cure cancer is maybe a little bit of a jump". No AI-designed drug has yet won full approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Only about one in 10 drugs that enter human trials reach the market, and for cancer drugs the figure is closer to one in 20.nypost.com+1

Limits of the models

Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus called Amodei's timeline "so naive as to be absurd." He pointed out that AI cannot speed up multi-phase preclinical and clinical testing. Marcus and cardiologist Eric Topol argue that current AI models lack the deep causal and biological understanding needed to produce cures reliably. Pharmaceutical leaders add that finding promising molecules faster does not skip the trials and reviews that take up most of the 10- to 12-year drug development process.newsbytesapp.com+2