OpenAI agents analyzed a whole mouse brain in 32 minutes, a job that would take humans months

#What happened

• OpenAI teamed up with PerturbAI and Scripps Research to deploy thousands of AI agents against biological data from millions of mouse cells, reported by The Decoder on October 22, 2026.
• The agents ran on GPT-Rosalind and worked through a whole-brain CRISPR atlas, which maps how gene changes affect different cell types in the mouse brain.
• Each agent took on a single gene perturbation, analyzed how the cells responded, and searched the scientific literature for explanations.
• The full analysis took 32 minutes; the team estimates doing the same analysis by hand would take anywhere from several months to a year.

#Why it matters

• The agents surfaced unexpected differences between two disease-related genes and a possible link between cholesterol regulation and neurodegeneration. OpenAI says these leads should help researchers decide which mechanisms to test in the lab first.
• In blind comparisons, human experts preferred the distributed agents' reports over those from a single agent 75 percent of the time.
• The resulting "Reasoning Atlas" is available on GitHub, and the accompanying paper is out on bioRxiv.

Verified October 22, 2026.