SandboxAQ puts drug discovery AI into ChatGPT-style interface

Drug discovery is one of the most expensive pursuits in modern industry. Finding a single viable molecule can take a decade and cost billions, and most candidates still don't make it. A generation of AI startups has promised to fix that — most have made the problem less painful for researchers, who are already technically sophisticated enough to use the tools.

But SandboxAQ thinks the bottleneck isn't the models. It's the interface.

The company has teamed up with Anthropic to integrate its scientific AI models directly into Claude — putting powerful drug discovery and materials science tools behind a conversational interface that requires no specialized computing infrastructure to use.

How does it work?

SandboxAQ has built what it calls large quantitative models, or LQMs. These proprietary models are "physics-grounded," meaning they're built on the rules of the physical world rather than patterns in text.

The models can:

• Run quantum chemistry calculations
• Simulate molecular dynamics
• Study microkinetics — how chemical reactions unfold at the molecular level

This matters because it tells researchers how candidate molecules are likely to behave before anyone sets foot in a lab.

"For the first time, we have a frontier [quantitative] model on a frontier LLM that someone can access in natural language," Nadia Harhen, SandboxAQ's general manager of AI simulation, told TechCrunch. Previously, users of SandboxAQ's LQMs would have had to provide their own digital infrastructure to run the models.

Why does it matter?

Most AI drug discovery companies have focused on building better models. SandboxAQ is focused on who can actually use them.

SandboxAQ's customers tend to be computational scientists, research scientists, or experimentalists. Generally, these people work at large pharmaceutical or industrial companies and are searching for new materials that can become marketable products.

"Our customers come to us because they've tried all the other software out there, and the complexity of their problem is such that it didn't work or didn't yield positive results for them when that translation went to take place in the real world," said Harhen.

The context

Founded roughly five years ago as an Alphabet spinout, SandboxAQ counts Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, as its chairman. The company has raised more than $950 million from investors and has built out several business lines, including a cybersecurity division.

SandboxAQ is targeting what it calls the "quantitative economy" — a $50+ trillion sector spanning biopharma, financial services, energy, and advanced materials. This suggests the company isn't building another chatbot or code assistant. It's chasing the economy that AI is supposed to transform.

While companies like Chai Discovery and Isomorphic Labs — both well-funded bets on better models — have focused on the science, SandboxAQ is focused on accessibility. By putting complex scientific models behind a simple chat interface, the company is betting that ease of use, not just model quality, will determine which AI tools actually get adopted in the lab.