Fidji Simo, the former OpenAI executive who cofounded the biomedical startup ChronicleBio, said she believes AI can eventually cure all diseases, but smarter models alone won’t get us there.
In an X post on Monday, Simo responded to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who wrote over the weekend that AI companies need to deliver concrete breakthroughs to win over a skeptical public.
“I disagree with Dario on most things, but this is spot on: ‘At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.”’ Simo wrote, quoting Amodei’s post.
Amodei’s comments were part of a broader defense of Anthropic’s outlook on AI. On Saturday, he pushed back on the idea that he has been too pessimistic about the technology’s potential benefits. He said the industry has contributed to public skepticism because it has made sweeping promises without delivering on them.
Simo agreed with Amodei’s point on delivering on medical breakthroughs and said the problem is that people often draw a straight line from intelligent AI models to cures without accounting for the infrastructure needed in between.
She said the “bigger bottleneck” is having the “right biological data,” and that AI can’t reason its way to cures without the data needed to understand a particular disease.
“Ironically, that’s why I’m most bullish on AI making dramatic progress in cancer first: decades of investment have produced extraordinary datasets across genomics, pathology, imaging, clinical outcomes, and more,” she wrote.
For more complex chronic diseases, she said, much of that infrastructure doesn’t exist.
Simo’s work with ChronicleBio is aimed at those issues. In August 2025, around the same time she joined OpenAI as its CEO of Applications, Simo cofounded the biotech company, which is building datasets to better understand complex chronic conditions.
Simo has also spoken about living with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a chronic condition that can be difficult to diagnose and treat.
In July, Simo announced she was stepping down from her full-time role at OpenAI to focus on her recovery after taking medical leave.
“Model intelligence and biological infrastructure are going to have to scale together,” Simo wrote on Monday. “I really do believe AI can cure all diseases but only if we build the infrastructure to translate intelligence into cures at the same pace that models improve.”
Simo did not immediately return a request for comment.
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