Sam Altman says OpenAI may invest in AI drug discovery firms and take royalties on breakthroughs

Altman Says OpenAI May Back Firms Using AI for Drug Discovery

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said his company may consider investing in or subsidizing firms that make significant use of its AI technologies to discover new drugs or therapies, and possibly take a royalty in exchange The AI developer could choose to cover the cost of using its artificial intelligence models in partnership with a drug company and then "get some royalty" from discoveries made by that firm, Altman said at Cisco Systems Inc.'s AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. The ChatGPT maker has no such partnerships at present, he said. "This is not something we're doing now, but I think the frontier of scientific discovery with AI will require so much capital that maybe we think of ourselves as an investor in some of those cases," he said. OpenAI and its competitors such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Anthropic have increasingly focused on scientific and health care-related applications for AI -- ranging from using the technology to help guide research on new drugs to having it review personal medical data. Altman's comments provide some clarity on how the firm is thinking about profiting from any breakthroughs that come as a result of its technology. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar suggested the company would take a cut of discoveries made by using its AI software. But Altman said OpenAI would not do so for customers who merely tap OpenAI's models by using its application programming interfaces. "That's great and that's theirs," he said.

Sam Altman Explores New Economics for AI-Driven Scientific Discovery | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Speaking with Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, Altman cast this idea in cautious language, noting that what he described is not something OpenAI is doing today but a possibility on the horizon. "This is not something we're doing now," Altman said, "but I think the frontier of scientific discovery with AI will require so much capital that maybe we think of ourselves as an investor in some of those cases." He added that this would apply to work so resource-intensive that customers alone could not shoulder it. Altman's Summit remarks sit at the intersection of two emerging trends. First is the evolution of artificial intelligence from reactive tools to persistent collaborators embedded across workflows, systems that observe, act and manage context over time. In domains like drug discovery and scientific research, that transition exposes gaps not just in capability but in economics: the compute, infrastructure and expertise required to convert hypotheses into tangible breakthroughs can be enormous. That insight drove Altman's framing that OpenAI might consider sharing risk, not just selling compute. Unlike traditional software pricing based on subscriptions or usage, this approach imagines the company participating financially in the long-term value its systems help unlock. Second, there is emerging evidence that OpenAI's leadership is publicly contemplating new revenue models, a trend signaled by comments beyond the Cisco stage. According to The Information, OpenAI's CFO has suggested the company could take a cut of value created when customers' AI-aided discoveries become commercially valuable, for example, by securing a license to a drug discovered with the help of OpenAI's technology or taking a share of profits from a successful outcome. That idea of "value sharing" represents a shift from the traditional model of charging for access and usage toward outcome-based pricing, where the provider's financial returns are tied to the success customers achieve using its tools. It raises questions about how AI platforms position themselves relative to customer value creation and whether intelligence providers should share in the upside when their systems materially contribute to profitable discoveries.