November 12th message,“cancerI believe that these diseases will become history in less than a decade.” Claude Developer Anthropic Dario Amordi, Chief Executive OfficerDario AmodeiThis bold prediction has been made in recent days。
These are not rare diseases, and they affect millions of families, some of them still the most difficult challenge in the medical world。
“I believe that if we can make the right use of this technology, we can hope to usher in an era of miracles that will allow humanity to resolve the difficult problems that it has been unable to overcome for thousands of years.”
In his view, artificial intelligence was expected to significantly accelerate the process of biological research, drug development and medical breakthroughs。
1AI It is noted that Amody is not alone in holding similar views. Similar optimism was expressed by other leading figures in the field of artificial intelligence, including Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, head of Google AI。
Harsabis has suggested that artificial intelligence may have constricted the drug research and development that would have taken 10 years to complete in a few weeks, and may even be expected to usher in an era of “end of disease” in a decade to cure all diseases。
He also cited the breakthrough of the AlphaFold project, noting that artificial intelligence had been able to significantly accelerate biological research. AlphaFold successfully projected more than 200 million protein structures, a major scientific achievement。
However, the success of AlphaFold does not prove that artificial intelligence can develop drugs to treat cancer, Alzheimer ' s disease or other complex diseases within 10 years。
Mask also claimed that, with the development of artificial intelligence technology, all human beings would have access to the highest level of medical care available to the President of the United States。
But the real professionals in charge of drug research and development do not necessarily agree with these optimistic timetables。
Medical experts and pharmaceutical executives don't buy
Jeff Leiden, Executive Chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, has condemned such predictions as “a complete nonsense”。
He revealed that Vertex had tested about 50 family-worker intelligence companies to screen potential candidates from 10,000 drug compounds, but none had been able to independently develop a truly usable drug。
The senior officials of the pharmaceutical industry emphasized that even artificial intelligence could speed up molecular screening in the early stages of drug development and could not bypass clinical trials, regulatory clearances and biological tests in animal and human models. These links account for most of the entire drug development cycle, and complete drug development usually takes 10 to 12 years。
Finding a seemingly promising molecule in a computer model is only the first step in drug development. Researchers still need to be tested in laboratories and animal models, and ultimately, through human clinical trials, to confirm whether the drug is safe and truly effective。
Artificial intelligence may speed up the screening process for potential treatment programmes, but it is not possible to directly eliminate these essential links。
Critics such as the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and the cardiologist and digital medical expert Eric Topol also noted that current artificial intelligence models still lack the capacity to understand causality and biological mechanisms in depth and therefore cannot reliably contribute to a truly breakthrough treatment。
As of 2026, there was no single artificially intelligent drug for full clinical application。
In addition, there are many breakthroughs in the medical history that have been placed in high hopes and have ultimately failed to meet expectations. A case in point is the “war against cancer” launched by the United States in the 1970s。
Experts warned that such radical predictions could give rise to public expectations of scientific progress far beyond current real capabilities. It is true that artificial intelligence is expected to change the way drugs are developed, but there is still a long way to go from accelerating research to truly combating complex diseases。