The OpenAI Foundation announced today that it will fund an initiative to use data from failed biotech companies to train medical artificial intelligence systems. Last year, clinical trials policy analyst Ruxandra Teslo proposed bidding at bankruptcy proceedings to obtain regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data. She termed these restricted documents biotech lost archive. She argued they could train artificial intelligence to act as a copilot in the opaque drug approval process.
This funding is part of a new OpenAI Foundation effort called Public Data for Health. The program aims to help artificial intelligence advance in medicine by paying to create high quality scientific datasets. Morgan Levine, a former vice president for computation at Altos Labs, stated that data is the biggest bottleneck in applying artificial intelligence to biology. The OpenAI Foundation announced initial data grants totaling $40 million. This includes support for a program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, collecting novel cancer vaccine data, and OpenAdmet, a group running drug effect prediction competitions.
Teslo received $500,000 for her biotech archive idea. The project will be pursued by 1Day Sooner, a clinical trial volunteer advocacy group she advises. The OpenAI Foundation stated it expects many remaining disease prevention breakthroughs to come from pairing new model intelligence with more observations of the world. OpenAI began as a nonprofit before leader Sam Altman restructured it into a for-profit corporation. The for-profit arm develops models, launches products, and plans an initial public offering that could value the company at $1 trillion.
The foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI. It is on track to become the richest charitable organization on the planet with a potential stock value of $250 billion. By comparison, the Gates Foundation and an associated trust held about $180 billion at the end of 2025. The San Francisco-based foundation started ramping up grantmaking this year. Its largest single gift to date was $100 million awarded in August to the Common Health Coalition to help patients access hepatitis C drugs.
These charitable efforts coincide with apocalyptic fears regarding runaway artificial intelligence potentially wiping out humanity via bioweapons. Insiders have stoked these fears, with some estimating a 10% or higher chance of human extinction within the next decade. Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk both recently endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in calling for a slowed pace of artificial intelligence capability improvements to allow risk prevention to catch up. Jacob Trefethen, an executive at the foundation, stated it operates separately from OpenAI while sharing a mission to ensure artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Trefethen stated the foundation wants to give away $1 billion by the end of the year. The $500,000 grant will help 1Day Sooner prove it can acquire bankrupt company data troves. Josh Morrison, president and cofounder of 1Day Sooner, believes nonexclusive datasets could be acquired for a few tens of thousands of dollars each. His organization currently holds three datasets, including two donated by Lumen Bioscience. Morrison noted that two other attempts to obtain drug company files failed this year after their bids were rejected.
Bankruptcies are emerging as a new land grab for artificial intelligence training. Google recently won a bid to take over corporate data from bankrupt carrier Spirit Airlines, including 100 million emails, sparking privacy concerns from flight attendants. The drug company files sought by 1Day Sooner are common technical documents. They contain exchanges between companies and regulators alongside detailed scientific and medical measurements detailing everything known about a drug.
Teslo noted that a stockpile of these files could turn an artificial intelligence into a regulatory expert to speed cures to market. She pointed out that about 70% of money and time in drug development is spent in clinical development organising trials and testing. Despite this, the process remains a black box for small biotech innovators. 1Day Sooner plans to continue pursuing bankruptcy proceedings to build this archive.
