There’s something deeply unsettling about watching the future of medicine being built behind closed doors. I’ve been following the discussion around Isomorphic Labs’ latest protein folding AI – what people are calling “AlphaFold 4” – and the conversation has taken a turn that’s worth unpacking.

For those not familiar with the backstory, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 was a genuinely revolutionary moment in computational biology. It cracked the protein folding problem that had stumped scientists for decades, and they open-sourced it. The entire scientific community could access it, build on it, and use it to advance drug discovery. It felt like one of those rare moments where cutting-edge AI was actually being developed for humanity rather than at it.