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Each issue rounds up the month's most notable AI research touching chemistry, chemical engineering, and science education, drawn from our research dossiers. Browse by year below, newest first, and click any issue to read it in full.
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- July 2026
A monthly timeline of AI research in chemistry and engineering
2026
7 issues
AI News, 2026. Newest first.
- July 2026The Month AI Learned to Check Its Own Work (Sort Of)July was a quiet month for AI hype and a loud month for AI homework checking. A drug-screening pipeline got caught picking candidates no better than random guesses, and a robot lab needed a second AI just to supervise the first.
- June 2026The Month AI Discovered Chemistry Has RulesJune was the month AI had to account for geometry, physics, variable water, and students who were actively trying to make it fail. A new language model gave transition metal complexes a 3D view.
- May 2026The Month AI Had to Show Its WorkMay was the month AI had to leave the demo and touch something real: a small diagnostic device, a robotic materials loop, and new rules for engineering education.
- April 2026The Month AI Met the RulesApril's AI research had a practical mood. Models had to keep data private, respect thermodynamics, survive missing sensors, and avoid unsafe chemical routes.
- March 2026The Month AI Had to Show Its WorkMarch put AI in chemistry through four increasingly unglamorous tests: a polymer that exists, shared public infrastructure, critical metals recovered from waste, and a retraction.
- February 2026The Month AI Met Its ConstraintsFebruary's AI research had a repeated request: show your work and stay inside the laws of physics. Catalyst models extracted a chemical rule, and process agents checked their own calculations.
- January 2026AI Got a Lab, a Budget, and a Chemistry ExamJanuary was the month AI science stopped pretending the model was the whole system. Governments funded shared laboratories, and a chemistry exam found ChatGPT handled the word “NOT” better than the students.
2025
11 issues
AI News, 2025. Newest first.
- November 2025The Best Setting Was Not the Best of AnythingNovember's most useful finding was a negative one.
- October 2025Screening 3,300 Alloys to Avoid Buying RutheniumOctober was about making things that work in a real building. A screening framework found iron-copper and nickel-molybdenum catalysts that match ruthenium without the ruthenium price.
- September 2025Clear, Well-Formatted, and Missing the Hazard WarningSeptember delivered the industrial numbers everyone had been asking for. CATL validated 200 battery formulations a day. Tesla cut a test cycle from 70 hours to 6.
- August 2025Ten Billion Molecules, and Most of Them Sounded FamiliarAugust was a peer-reviewed month, which makes a pleasant change. IBM built a molecular generator fast enough to produce ten billion structures and then honestly reported what happens when you do.
- July 2025The Machines Stopped Waiting AroundJuly's best idea was to stop waiting. A self-driving lab that used to idle up to 60 minutes per experiment started measuring during the transitions instead and got ten times the data.
- June 2025Everybody Open-Sourced Something, Including the ProblemsJune was the month the tooling got given away. Microsoft released a neural functional and the dataset behind it. MIT CSAIL and Recursion open-sourced a binding affinity predictor under the MIT license.
- May 2025The Model Was Right More Often and Wrong More ConfidentlyMay produced the first peer-reviewed head-to-head between language models and expert chemists, and the models won on points. They also learned nothing about when to hesitate.
- April 2025The Month Constraints Beat CapacityApril was the month the field stopped adding parameters and started adding rules. MIT modeled all of hydrogen combustion with 344 of them. A 7-billion parameter chemistry model beat the general-purpose giants by knowing one thing well.
- March 2025Fifty Years of Simulation, Compressed Into a DayMarch was a month of AI doing less with more. A battery startup replaced an estimated 50 years of physics simulation with under 24 hours of generative modeling. A chemistry model beat the standard benchmark using roughly a tenth of the training data.
- February 2025The Machines Started Arguing With ThemselvesFebruary was the month AI stopped answering questions and started holding debates. Google built a system where specialized agents argue over hypotheses in ranked tournaments until one survives.
- January 2025The Month the Benchmarks Turned On Their Own ModelsJanuary was the month chemical AI stopped grading itself on a curve. Researchers spent it building benchmarks designed to catch their own tools cheating, and the tools obliged.