OpenAI Foundation Funds Push to Build Biology Data for AI, Including Bankrupt Biotech Files

The plan originated with Ruxandra Teslo, a clinical trial policy analyst who last year proposed using data from failed biotech companies. By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she suggested, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data, information usually kept hidden as valuable trade secrets. She called the documents 'biotech’s lost archive' and said they could be used to train AIs that would act as co-pilots in the often opaque drug approval process. The foundation said it would fund her idea.

In its initial round of data grants, the OpenAI Foundation announced it would give $40 million to a program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to collect data about novel cancer vaccines. It 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.

The foundation said it expects many remaining breakthroughs in preventing and curing disease to come from pairing the intelligence of new models with more observations of the world, or more data. Morgan Levine, a former vice president for computation at the longevity company Altos Labs, said everyone is recognizing that data is the biggest bottleneck in successfully applying AI to biology.

OpenAI started as a nonprofit, but its leader, Sam Altman, forked its personnel into a for-profit corporation that develops new models, launches products, and 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 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 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 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 AI models’ capabilities are improved so that risk prevention can catch up.

Jacob Trefethen, an executive at the foundation, said 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 said 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, according to Josh Morrison, the organization’s president and co-founder. 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. Morrison said two other attempts to obtain drug company files this year proved unsuccessful after 1Day Sooner’s bids were not accepted.

Bankruptcies could become what some are calling a new land grab for AI training. Last month, Google won a bid to take over the corporate data of failed carrier Spirit Airlines, including 100 million emails. That led to objections from flight attendants and others who worried that private or proprietary data could be exposed. The drug company files that 1Day Sooner is seeking are known as common technical documents.

Editor's Summary

The OpenAI Foundation is putting $500,000 behind a plan to mine bankrupt biotech companies’ files, alongside $40 million for cancer vaccine data and support for OpenAdmet, as it seeks to ease a data bottleneck in biological AI. The foundation, which holds a 26% stake in OpenAI and could become the world’s richest charity, says it hopes to give away $1 billion by year’s end. The effort comes amid debate over AI risk and concerns about using bankruptcy proceedings to obtain private data.