A clip of the remark began circulating on X Thursday morning, a day after midterm results that Brockman acknowledged had caught the AI industry off guard on data centers.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman told an audience at WSJ Tech in Napa on Wednesday that AI will deliver significant progress on biology, health and disease within the next 12 to 18 months. Brockman, interviewed by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, acknowledged that promising cures has become a cliché in the AI industry but said this round of results would be different, TechSpot reported.
He also said biology isn't a problem unique to humans and raised the prospect of "death becoming a choice," adding that all of it is possible, according to Wccftech's transcript.
MTS posted the clip on X around 7:30 a.m. PT Thursday, and by late morning it had about 49,000 views and 1,400 likes. X has since made it a trending news story. Views have climbed steadily, and many replies argued that ending death doesn't belong on a product roadmap.
At State of AI, we think OpenAI's biology work deserves attention on its own merits. Describing it as a path to optional mortality, in the same interview where Brockman discussed a 2027 IPO, makes that work harder to evaluate.
The Drug Pipeline Doesn't Run on 18-Month Cycles
OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, a reasoning model for biology, drug discovery and translational medicine, in April. It came out of research preview in September with published pricing starting Oct. 5, and its partners include Amgen, Moderna, Thermo Fisher Scientific and the Allen Institute, Pharmaphorum reported. Anthropic has moved in the same direction, buying a one-person biotech and reporting early results from six drug partners in October.
At Rosalind's launch, OpenAI itself said U.S. drugs typically take 10 to 15 years to go from target discovery to approval, Quartz noted. Models like Rosalind mostly help with early research, including literature review, hypothesis generation and experiment planning. Decrypt reported that early benchmark results were strong but that real-world impact has so far been limited. Clinical trials and regulatory review account for most of a drug's timeline, and AI hasn't shortened either one much yet.
Measurable research progress within 18 months is a reasonable expectation. Approved cures on that schedule would be unprecedented, and Brockman gave no timeline for the idea that death could become a choice. TechSpot also pointed out that AI executives have been promising medical breakthroughs within a year or two since ChatGPT launched.
The Rest of the Interview
Brockman also told Hagey that the first half of 2026 was "pretty rough" for OpenAI, with Anthropic gaining early ground among business customers. He said annualized revenue grew 70% from the second quarter to the third, OODA Loop reported.
He said enterprise customers, who once accounted for about 30% of revenue, now make up the majority. When Hagey asked whether OpenAI could be ready to go public in 2027, he replied, "I think so. Yes," according to Securities.io.
He acknowledged that the industry had been surprised by the backlash against data centers in Tuesday's elections and said more work was needed to win over communities, BigGo Finance reported. OpenAI has already proposed renaming its data centers "AI compute campuses" as part of a post-election policy push.
Brockman covered OpenAI's recovery, its IPO readiness and the data center backlash in the same conversation as his comments about death. The longevity remark is the part that spread online.
Musk Has Said Something Similar
Wccftech noted that the comment echoes Elon Musk, who said in January that longevity is a highly solvable problem and said in October that it's coming. Musk and Brockman are otherwise on opposite sides of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and its executives.
The remark also comes as public opinion on AI is souring. Rep. Yassamin Ansari wants a pause on frontier AI at the top of the new Democratic majority's agenda. National polling shows most young Americans use AI about as much as they did last year and like it less. For many people, AI is tied to rising power bills and worries about jobs, and claims about ending death are unlikely to change that.
Our Take
Companies in pharma and healthcare should read Brockman's 18-month prediction as a forecast about research speed, not about treatments reaching patients. When vendors make similar claims, it's worth asking which stage of drug development their models speed up and what partners have measured so far.
Leaders should also expect OpenAI's public claims to get bigger as it prepares for a possible IPO. Brockman's revenue figures and IPO comments came in the same interview as his remarks about death, and a pitch aimed at investors often reaches procurement teams too. Asking for the data behind those claims is a reasonable step.
Reputation belongs in any assessment of vendor risk as well. Customers and employees see clips like this one, and companies that build OpenAI into customer-facing products carry some of the public reaction to its leadership.
If OpenAI produces real advances in biology over the next 18 months, the results will matter more than anything Brockman said about death. If it doesn't, expect this clip to resurface.
