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Who to know: Ben Liu, CEO, Formation Bio
We hear a lot about how AI is accelerating drug discovery. But the number of drugs approved by the FDA has remained constant throughout the AI revolution, at around 50 per year. “The biggest problem in bringing new drugs to patients hasn’t been drug discovery for a long time,” says Ben Liu, founder and CEO of Formation Bio, an AI company working in biotechnology. The real limiting factor, he says, is conducting clinical trials, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Formation Bio, which is backed by high-profile investors including Sam Altman and Michael Moritz, instead applies AI to this stage of the process. They claim they can save up to 50% of a trial’s time by using AI to speed up administrative tasks such as patient recruitment, regulatory filings, and matching drugs to specific diseases. (Training does not use AI to speed up the so-called trial processing period – the length of time the drug is actually tested on patients – but rather the administrative and analytical tasks that precede and follow.)
Their business model involves purchasing three to four promising drugs per year, conducting trials themselves, and screening successful candidates to make a big profit. So far, Liu says, they have successfully sold two drugs: one to Sanofi, in a deal worth €545 million, and a second, in which they had a minority stake, to Eli Lilly, for a total sales value of just under $2 billion.
“Part of the motivation comes from the fact that we believe you can build a better pharmaceutical company,” Liu says. “If you can do trials cheaper and faster, and instead of 100,000 people, you employ 100 people using these AI systems to do most of the knowledge work, you should be able to offer drugs with much greater access at a lower cost. »
What you need to know: US rejects international report on AI safety
The Trump administration has refused to sign a global intergovernmental report that warns of the dangers inherent in the breakneck pace of AI development, my colleague Harry Booth reports for TIME.
The second international report on AI safety, released today, was led by Turing Prize-winning scientist Yoshua Bengio. It was co-signed by 30 governments and international organizations, including China, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Its aim was to establish a common understanding of the evolving evidence of AI risks, so that governments can manage them more effectively. But with the world leader in the AI race not signing its name to the report for the first time, that mission has been called into question at a critical time.
What the report says… Contrary to the view that AI progress is hitting a wall, the report claims that in fact, “over the past year, the capabilities of general-purpose AI models and systems have continued to improve.” Its authors admit that it is impossible to know how long this pace of progress will last – and whether AI will eventually, as top CEOs predict, be able to surpass human performance in the most profitable tasks. But they say it would be remiss not to consider the possibility. “A wise strategy, whether you’re in government or business, is to prepare for all plausible scenarios,” Bengio tells TIME.
The risks – The report also finds that risks that many have warned about advanced AI, such as the possibility of helping novices create biological weapons, are becoming a more robust scientific consensus, although doubts remain. There is already strong evidence, the report notes, that current AI systems are also being used by criminal groups and state-sponsored attackers to increase the reach and speed of their cyber operations.
AIs behave badly — Another category of risk is increasingly evident: the worrying tendency of AI systems to occasionally plot against their creators, including hiding bad behavior if they know they are being tested. Since January 2025, the report says, “models have shown more advanced planning and monitoring capabilities, making it more difficult to assess their capabilities”, although it admits that expert opinion on the likelihood of this ultimately leading to humans losing control of AI systems “varies considerably”.
Gerrit De Vynck writes: “Google violated its own policies that prohibited the use of artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance in 2024 by helping an Israeli military contractor analyze drone video footage, a former Google employee alleged in a confidential federal whistleblower complaint reviewed by the Washington Post. Google’s Gemini AI technology was being used by Israel’s defense apparatus at a time when the company was publicly distancing itself from the country’s military.”