By Nature
Publication Date: 2025-12-17 00:00:00
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are no longer just tools for science – they now act as “co-scientists,” participating in all phases of research design and analysis. Traditionally, researchers start with a well-defined question or problem, such as predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, and then develop or apply AI tools (like AlphaFold) to solve that specific problem. Over the past year, researchers have increasingly begun using AI as co-scientists, participating in a broader range of scientific activities, including hypothesis generation, experimental design, and paper writing1,2,3,4,5. These AI co-scientists are driven by advances in AI agents – autonomous systems based on large language models (LLMs) that can use tools, access external databases, and search scientific literature.
Although there are promising examples of AI co-scientists designing nanobodies and generating experimentally validated hypotheses, this remains an emerging…
