OpenAI says it is finalising more than $100 million in grants this month across six research institutions to support and accelerate Alzheimer’s research, according to a blog post published on Wednesday.
The grants are grouped under the title “AI for Alzheimer’s”.
The post says the funding will go toward work that includes human scientists, clinicians and patients, while also backing AI-related research tools in areas such as drug discovery.
OpenAI set out five concepts to organise the effort. They are: “Create a ‘causal map’ of Alzheimer’s using AI, to validate targets for intervention”; “Design new drugs with the help of AI, and test them in the lab”; “Support open datasets to predict drug activity, and chart the progression of disease with and without intervention”; “Establish new biomarkers for disease, improving diagnosis and how clinical trials are run”; and “Test off-patent treatments and use AI to make the best sense of anonymised patient data and experiences reported online.”
Four of those five concepts refer directly to AI or imply its use.
The foundation also highlighted clinical trials in its publicity material and said it would help pay for them.
In a blog post last month about its mission, the OpenAI Foundation said its former “Health & Curing Diseases” section would now be called “Life Sciences & Curing Diseases”.
It said the new emphasis on “life science” was intended to “reflect the Foundation’s focus on advancing biology and medical research as core to curing disease.”
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has also publicly promoted AI’s role in medical research. In a post on X on March 24, 2026, he wrote: “AI will help discover new science, such as cures for diseases, which is perhaps the most important way to increase quality of life long-term. AI will also present new threats to society that we have to address. No company can sufficiently mitigate these on their own; we will…”
The OpenAI announcement was compared with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a philanthropy-backed medical research effort led by Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.
Its homepage says: “Our mission is to cure or prevent all disease.”
When Chan and Zuckerberg’s foundation bought AI biology lab EvolutionaryScale, it did not disclose the financial terms, according to Axios.
Gizmodo said it contacted Biohub for comment and would update its article if it received a response.
The source article’s author wrote: “But even if that happened, today’s AI philanthropy still would not deserve as much credit as the actual human scientists who performed actual lab experiments.”
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