Doctors push back on Amodei’s claim AI will end cancer within a decade

Germany’s former health minister Karl Lauterbach has said that curing cancer, Alzheimer’s and mental illness within ten years is impossible. He was answering Dario Amodei, whose company’s IPO roadshow video says those diseases will be “relics of the past” within a decade.

Doctors and a biotech executive have pushed back too, Business Insider reported on 11 November. Truman Dickerson gathered the reactions as Anthropic courts investors ahead of its listing.

Anthropic began marketing its shares on 10 November with a roadshow video . In it, Amodei, the company’s chief executive, named four diseases.

“You know, if today we look at things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, mental illness, these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade,” Amodei said.

“I think if we do this right, we can create an age of miracles where humanity is able to solve problems that have eluded us for millennia,” he added.

He tied the promise to safety. The company that gets the risks right will have “the license to operate that society trusts,” he said.

“First, we believe that AI will profoundly accelerate the rate of progress in biology and medicine, potentially curing diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, rare genetic diseases, and the major infectious diseases,” the letter says.

Anthropic already works with pharmaceutical companies on tasks from drug discovery to clinical trials, the letter says. It says its work can cut the time to write clinical trial reports “from months to minutes.”

The letter gives other examples. The World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa used Claude during the 2026 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Preparing its daily situation report fell from a full day to under an hour, the founders wrote.

With the Gates Foundation, Anthropic supports free AI clinical search for doctors in roughly 100 low- and middle-income countries. The founders also wrote that Anthropic has discovered a molecular machine that might become a new biotechnology tool, perhaps for gene editing.

About 4.6 billion people still lack access to essential health services, the letter says, citing the WHO and the World Bank. AI can help get treatments to where they are most needed, the founders wrote.

The same letter lists “underpromise and overdeliver” among Anthropic’s guiding principles.

Lauterbach, a doctor and epidemiologist, answered in German on X on 11 November.

“It is unclear whether people like @DarioAmodei know so little about medicine or are deliberately misleading the public. Curing cancer, Alzheimer’s and mental illness can definitely benefit from AI. But it cannot possibly happen in just 10 years,” Lauterbach wrote (translated by TNW).

Melinda B. Chu, an AI medical researcher and doctor at Saint Louis University, also questioned the claim, according to Business Insider.

“Anthropic has done nothing to suggest they themselves will contribute meaningfully to these goals,” Chu said.

Rami Elghandour, a biotech executive, pointed to the setting of the claim.

“I’ve taken two companies public. These are insane things to say in an IPO pitch,” Elghandour said, according to Business Insider.

Amodei has questioned this kind of promise himself. In an X post in August, he wrote that “saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.” The best way to win over sceptics was to “actually cure cancer,” he wrote, as Business Insider noted.

Anthropic has started building its own biology work. In October, it bought a one-person biotech start-up working on muscular dystrophy. It has bought several biotech start-ups, according to Business Insider.

Anthropic said in an October blog post that it had “begun drug discovery efforts of our own,” Business Insider noted. It also reported, citing a person familiar, that Anthropic runs a wet lab in the Bay Area.

The letter says Anthropic will work with partners to validate the discoveries it expects Claude to make. Its public benefit fund of at least 5% of its shares could also go to science, medicine and global health, the founders wrote.

Anthropic’s IPO seeks a $1.4 trillion valuation . Its shares are due to start trading on Nasdaq on 19 November.