Fidji Simo says she believes AI can 'cure all diseases,' agreeing with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

Fidji Simo, who was diagnosed with an incurable illness in 2019, said she believes AI has the potential to cure all diseases.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said AI labs need to deliver on promises like curing diseases.

Fidji Simo, cofounder of ChronicleBio, agreed and said AI needs more data to get there.

Simo was diagnosed in 2019 with a condition known as POTS, which has no cure.

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.