Washington

"Cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness, these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade," Claude maker Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei said.

These are not obscure medical conditions, they affect millions of families, and some of them remain among medicine's toughest challenges till date.

"I think 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," Amodei said.

Amodei sees AI as a technology capable of dramatically accelerating biological research, drug discovery and medical breakthroughs.

Amodei isn't alone. His promise is echoed by other AI leaders including Elon Musk and Google's AI boss Demis Hassabis. Hassabis has suggested AI could compress a decade of drug discovery into weeks, potentially bringing about the "end of disease" or curing all diseases within a decade.

Hassabis has pointed to breakthroughs like AlphaFold-which mapped over 200 million protein structures-as proof that AI can radically accelerate biological research. While AlphaFold is a genuine scientific achievement, it is not proof that AI can produce cures for cancer, Alzheimer's or other complex diseases within a decade. Musk has claimed that all of humanity will have access to the best medical care at the same level that the President of The United States gets thanks to AI advancements. But there's a catch. The people who actually develop medicines aren't necessarily buying this timeline. Jeff Leiden, executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals has dismissed these timelines as "complete BS," noting that Vertex tested roughly 50 AI companies to comb through 10,000 drug compounds and not a single one generated a working drug on its own.

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