Jayden Clark first heard about Chinese peptides at his Fourth of July party this past year.
In the backyard of a San Francisco Victorian, tech workers in their 20s and 30s chatted against the backdrop of sunshine, grilled meats, and a big American flag. One artificial intelligence founder mentioned buying cheap drugs directly from Chinese manufacturers. A group soon formed around him, jumping into the conversation to share their own sources for the medication they use for weight loss, productivity, and fitness.
Mr. Clark, 27, had lived through several injection crazes in the bodybuilding community (he’s a self-proclaimed “gym bro” who posts under the X username @creatine_cycle), but was surprised to hear them talked about by the A.I. crowd.
“Something i have learned over this long weekend in SF is that the elites all have a chinese peptide dealer,” Mr. Clark, who hosts a podcast on tech culture, posted on X. The term “Chinese peptides” quickly became a meme.
Gray-market peptides have flooded some corners of the tech scene recently, showing up in hacker houses, start-up offices and even “peptide raves” sponsored by suppliers. One recent event at Frontier Tower in San Francisco featured a mix-your-own peptides workshop, a D.J. playing techno with chemistry structures projected in the background and a dress code calling for “crazy futuristic cyberpunk attire.”
Peptides are short chains of amino acids that regulate hormones and reduce inflammation in the human body. They are best known as the P in GLP-1s — the class of drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy, which have transformed the weight-loss industry by mimicking a hormone that suppresses appetite.
But on Silicon Valley’s frontiers, a wider array of unproven, unregulated peptides has taken hold: People are trying BPC-157 and TB-500 for healing injuries by stimulating new blood vessel growth, oxytocin for improving eye contact (one OpenAI researcher called it “Ozempic for autism”), epitalon for sleep and retatrutide — a next-generation weight-loss drug still in clinical trials — for everything from appetite suppression to increased focus.
According to U.S. customs data, imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025, from $164 million in the same period of 2024. This includes demand for GLPs, melanotan II, and other peptides from compounding pharmacies and gray-market suppliers.
Aside from the GLP-1s for weight loss, none have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to sell for human use. Pharmaceutical companies have been reluctant to invest in peptide trials, given that most are easy to manufacture and don’t directly target a disease. These conditions have fostered a thriving gray market.
At one Manhattan meet-up of biohackers — people who experiment with regimens and supplements to improve their body’s performance — “each week someone will bring something new, and everyone will inject it,” said David Petersen, a tech investor and co-founder of the logistics unicorn Flexport. “It looks like a bunch of heroin addicts,” he joked. He has been using peptides since 2018, and credits epitalon with adding “an hour and a half” of sleep and melanotan, which increases melanin production, with curing his rosacea.
The F.D.A. has warned that many peptides pose “serious safety risks” because of potential impurities and immune reactions. It has also barred pharmacies from compounding them, though enforcement is uneven.
Personal use is legal, though most doctors advise against it. “It’s unfounded and reckless,” said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a research center focused on individualized medicine.
Experimental peptide injections occasionally result in medical emergencies. In July, two women were hospitalized with swollen tongues, breathing difficulties and an increased heart rate after getting peptide injections at an anti-aging festival in Las Vegas. It’s unclear what specific peptides they received.
Still, for some in the tech world, using peptides is a form of faith in the possibility of inifite self-optimization. Mr. Clark said peptides, to some, offered tantalizing shortcuts: “Why be really consistent at the gym for six weeks if I could instead work 16 hours at my research job?”
But it also reveals a Silicon Valley mind-set in which some believe that — as innovators shaping our world — they don’t need guidance from federal regulators or medical doctors because they’re doing their own experimentation.
‘For research use only’
The drugs can be purchased directly from factories in China, the world’s peptide manufacturing hub, or through the websites of American intermediaries that import and test them. They arrive in powders in vials labeled “for research use only,” but the warning is a thin legal fiction. Users mix the peptides with sterile water and inject themselves, often with insulin syringes bought from Amazon.
The economics of off-market peptides are undoubtedly appealing. Prescription GLPs like Ozempic (semaglutide) and Zepbound (tirzepatide) could cost more than $1,000 per month until fairly recently, while the “research use” equivalents went for one-fifth the cost.
“Our average customer is closer to a Starbucks barista,” said a San Francisco-based supplier of Chinese peptides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is unlawful for suppliers to market them for human use. “But the techies were the first on this because of the willingness to take ridiculous risks.”
He observed that one person at a tech company would start using peptides, kicking off a cluster of users. “It always starts with the C.E.O.s, then C.T.O.s, then the C.O.O.s. A lot of hardware people are into it. Biopharma people are shockingly the most reserved — they’re a little too deferential to the F.D.A.”
Online advertising of unauthorized peptide formulations grew nearly eightfold from 2022 to 2024, said Gerard Olson, director of research at LegitScript, a firm that tracks problematic online marketing of pharmaceutical and other products. Dr. Paul Abramson, a concierge doctor in San Francisco, said he had seen a big uptick in peptide use in 2025, especially among young men in tech.
While weight loss is still the most popular driver of peptide use, patients are microdosing — taking very small amounts of — GLPs with the hope that it will help them combat other vices: alcoholism, excessive video game playing or online shopping. There are no clinical trials supporting microdosing, though anecdotal accounts are enticing to some.
“It just seems to be this obsession with cognitive maxxing,” said Mr. Clark, who remains a peptide skeptic.
Anelya Grant, 41, is a co-founder of an A.I. billing start-up by day and an amateur peptide blogger by night. She began microdosing semaglutide in 2023 when a friend suggested that it could mitigate work-induced stress eating. She said it was so effective that she had dived into a rabbit hole of personal peptide research.
After consulting a sports performance doctor, Ms. Grant added five more peptides to her regimen: MOTS-c, epitalon, GHK-Cu, Ipamorelin and Kisspeptin-10. Their hoped-for health benefits include better metabolism, muscle growth, skin, sleep, energy and hormone regulation. She orders them directly from Chinese manufacturers, which charge $50 to $100 per kit (one-tenth what F.D.A.-approved U.S.-labs charge), then pays an extra $250 to send them to Janoshik Analytics, a lab in the Czech Republic, for purity testing.
Asked if she had any background in biology, she laughed. “Absolutely no.” Like many fellow peptide enthusiasts, she gets her information primarily from word-of-mouth testimonials, Reddit threads, podcasts and conversations with ChatGPT. “It’s another thing I can tweak in addition to my S.E.O.,” she said.
Several other founders analogized their openness to untested peptides to their tolerance for business risk.
Dr. Abramson, whom Ms. Grant interviewed for a post on her blog, was less convinced. “The entrepreneurial parallel isn’t funding a scrappy start-up,” he said to her. “It’s wiring money to an unregistered offshore entity based on a pitch deck.”
‘Unfounded and reckless’
Dr. Topol, who has covered these trends in his Substack newsletter about medical misinformation, worries that people are extrapolating from the success of GLP-1s to dozens of untested, unrelated peptides, exposing themselves to contamination and long-term health risks in the process.
“‘Do your own research’ has lots of dangers,” Dr. Topol said. “If they really were good citizen scientists, they would know what the criteria are: randomized, placebo-controlled trials; peer-reviewed publications independent of the company. We don’t have any of those studies for most of these peptides.”
Dr. Topol identifies the root cause of such amateur biohacking as growing distrust of the medical establishment, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Where people have lost trust in the F.D.A., wellness influencers like Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan have brought experimental peptide use into the mainstream, in Mr. Rogan’s case while being sponsored by Ways2Well, a company selling “clinician-supervised peptide therapy.”
In an X post in October 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged to end the “aggressive suppression” of peptides. (The F.D.A. under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took enforcement action against some peptide sellers.) But while the Trump administration has approved Wegovy’s pill form after adding oral GLP-1s to the F.D.A.’s priority review list, it hasn’t taken action to deregulate other types of peptides. An H.H.S. spokesperson said the agency “cannot comment on future policy decisions.”
Most peptide enthusiasts, though, relished experimenting on their body like a research subject.
Brooke Bowman, 38, is the bushy-haired, fast-talking chief executive of Vibecamp, an annual gathering of the rationalist and post-rationalist communities. These groups are interested in metacognition, or improving the art of thinking itself — a proclivity that makes them especially interested in mind-enhancing substances. She considers herself a transhumanist — someone who believes in using technology to augment human abilities — and even got an RFID chip implanted in her hand to link to her Telegram profile when tapped. (The chip, which she got at a “human augmentation dance party,” was installed too deep and doesn’t work.)
Ms. Bowman started taking BPC-157 and TB-500 last year hoping to address chronic fatigue, and said her sleep had improved right away. She logs her injections in the Peptide Tracker app, monitors her sleep and heart rate, and gets bloodwork done regularly.
In August, she added retatrutide — not to lose weight, but for its potential “cognitive benefits” and to help her quit vaping. She said the peptide helped reduce nicotine cravings, but one day, she accidentally doubled her dose.
“My hair started falling out after a month because I was malnourished,” Ms. Bowman said. “It made my heart rate go up 10 beats per minute at night.”
Still, she plans to keep going.
Ms. Bowman never thought she would use syringes again — in 2020, she got clean from an addiction to recreational drugs. Peptides changed that.
“I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and I’m not getting that from crystal meth anymore, so it’s fun to have a new thing I’m experimenting with that isn’t horrible,” she said. Another shipment of her Chinese peptides was on its way.
‘Let the crazy people try’
One 29-year-old start-up founder had been taking prescription GLP-1s for nearly two years. Her weight dropped, but it came with frequent depressive swings. “I couldn’t get out of bed and work,” she said. (She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she worried that her use of the drugs would affect her career prospects. Biohackers who are addressing their productivity generally seemed more comfortable speaking publicly than those trying to lose weight, suggesting more stigma around the latter.)
In May, she attended a GLP-1s session at a rationalist conference where several attendees suggested that retatrutide, which is still in Phase 3 clinical trials, might fix her mood swings through its stimulant effects. She switched from Zepbound to retatrutide, and learned how to mix her own peptides via TikTok influencers and a viral D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.
For the start-up founder, the health benefits of weight loss were greater than the risks. She said she felt professional pressure to look good on camera. “I’ve been watching a ton of launch videos. I definitely notice now that founders aren’t overweight.”
Several off-label peptide users, including that founder, expressed excitement about what they saw as the Trump administration’s relatively laissez-faire approach to drug regulation. It echoes the sentiment of Silicon Valley leaders such as Balaji Srinivasan and Joe Lonsdale, who have accused F.D.A. regulators of being overly cautious.
Medical experts are frustrated by this mind-set.
“The point of the F.D.A. is to protect patients and consumers from shady medical entrepreneurs who would sell unsuspecting people dangerous things,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School and expert on medical regulation. “I think these people are doing things that are bad for their health based on the evidence, which is that there is none.”
But from the start-up founder’s point of view, “we might all be better off if we let the crazy people try the crazy peptides and filter down to the rest of us, instead of the system, which takes 10 years and is meant to protect everyone from everything.”
Robert Gebeloff, Peter Eavis and Lazaro Gamio contributed reporting.
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