AI models need more data about biology, and OpenAI is paying to create it

Last year, the clinical trial policy analyst Ruxandra Teslo posted an idea for super-charging medical AI systems: use data from failed biotech companies. By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she proposed, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data—information usually kept hidden as valuable trade secrets. She called these documents “biotech’s lost archive” and said they could be used to help train AIs that would act as powerful co-pilots in the often opaque drug approval process.

Today, the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit parent of OpenAI, said it would fund her idea as part of a new effort it calls Data for Public Health, which aims to help artificial intelligence make big leaps in medicine by funding the creation of “high-quality scientific datasets.” The basic idea is that AI isn’t going to be capable of making important breakthroughs in curing disease unless researchers can feed the models much more information than they have so far. In its initial round of data grants, the OpenAI Foundation announced it would give $40 million to a program to collect data about novel cancer vaccines at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will also support OpenAdmet, a group that runs competitions in which researchers try to predict drug effects. Teslo’s biotech archive idea received $500,000 and will be pursued by 1Day Sooner, an advocacy group representing clinical trial volunteers that she advises.

OpenAI started as a nonprofit, but leader Sam Altman forked its personnel into a for-profit corporation that develops new models, launches products, and which is now planning an initial public offering of stock that could value it at $1 trillion. Because the foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI, it is now be on track to become the richest charitable organization on the planet, potentially sitting on $250 billion in stock value. (By comparison, the Gates Foundation and a trust associated with it held about $180 billion at the end of 2025.) Making good use of that kind of money will not be easy. The foundation, based in San Francisco, is still hiring for many key roles and only started ramping up its grantmaking this year.

Its largest single gift so far, of $100 million, was awarded in August to the Common Health Coalition, an organization that helps patients get access to hepatitis C drugs. OpenAI’s charitable efforts come even as apocalyptic fears have broken out about the possibility that runaway AI could wipe out all human life. Those fears, which include the possibility of a deadly bioweapon, have been stoked by AI company insiders, some of whom say the chance of human extinction is 10% or more within the next decade.

Last week, Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk both endorsed a call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” so that risk prevention can catch up. Jacob Trefethen, an executive at the foundation, says it essentially operates separately from OpenAI, but shares an official mission of ensuring that artificial intelligence “benefits all of humanity.” “We're starting grantmaking when we think the best way to achieve that mission is to make grants to external non-profits, research institutions, and other third parties,” Trefethen said in an interview. He says the foundation hopes to give away $1 billion by the end of the year.

The $500,000 grant to 1Day Sooner will help the group prove it can obtain the data troves of bankrupt companies, says organization’s president and co-founder Josh Morrison. He thinks non-exclusive copies of company datasets could be acquired for only “a few tens of thousands of dollars” each. His organization is currently in possession of three datasets, two of them donated by Lumen Bioscience, a biotech that previously used the Chapter 11 strategy to gain insights into another company’s drug development efforts.