Unlocking the AI for Science Revolution: A Call to Action for Autonomous Science Instruments
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WASHINGTON D.C./LONDON, Feb. 4, 2026 – A fundamental redesign of scientific instrumentation is needed to keep pace with the rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), says a coalition of more than 25 prominent researchers and national lab scientists from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Japan.
A call to action published today by Renaissance Philanthropy, “On the Need for Autonomous Science Instruments”, identifies a critical bottleneck in the booming field of autonomous experimentation threatening the future of AI-driven scientific discovery.
With nearly $2 billion in public and private capital committed to autonomous laboratories in 2025 alone, self-driving labs have transitioned from a niche prototype to an emerging pillar of modern R&D. These facilities promise to accelerate discoveries in battery materials, carbon capture, and drug development. However, the paper argues that this ecosystem is severely constrained by legacy scientific instruments designed for human dexterity rather than robotic integration.
"We will not achieve the full potential of the 21st-century artificial intelligence solely on the substrate of 20th-century scientific infrastructure," said Charles Yang, of Renaissance Philanthropy and lead author of the paper. "Today, brilliant researchers are forced to 'hack' equipment to work with robots. We need a paradigm shift toward instruments that are automation-native by design."
The call to action, which grew out of the autonomous science instrument workshop hosted by Renaissance Philanthropy, and supported by Navigation Fund and Sloan Foundation, in October 2025, proposes three key attributes for this new class of autonomous science instruments: open data and software-defined instrument control, "Design-for-Automation" (DfA) to ensure physical compatibility with robotic manipulators, and modularity to enable flexible, reconfigurable lab architectures.
Enabling an AI-powered scientific renaissance will ultimately require a new class of scientific instruments and tools. To meet this need, Renaissance Philanthropy is scoping a fund to incubate and support new science instrument development - if you are interested in helping support this future, please get in touch by emailing labs@renphil.org.
Autonomous science instruments have gathered strong support from a number of leading experts:
Tom Kalil, founder and CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy: “Realizing this vision of autonomous science instruments will accelerate progress on some of the grand challenges of the 21st century, including compact fusion reactors, 600 mile per hour maglev trains, new therapies, materials that are stronger than steel and a fraction of the weight, and replacements for toxic “forever” chemicals.”
Kevin Weil, VP of Science at OpenAI: “AI is now starting to meaningfully accelerate scientific work—from contributing solutions to open math and physics conjectures, to helping scientists design better experiments and new materials. As that moves into the lab, AI can plan experiments and robotic systems can run them continuously, with the results streaming back to the AI to refine the experiment. Building instruments that are open and designed for this kind of AI-driven experimentation is a key part of enabling faster cycles of discovery across science.”
Theresa Mayer, Carnegie Mellon University's Vice President for Research: “AI-enabled autonomous labs, including Carnegie Mellon's AI Science Foundry, are ushering in a new era of science – one that changes how we fundamentally work and speeds our ability to drive innovations to impact. These labs demand robotic-controlled instruments and AI agents that are intelligent, interoperable and designed for continuous experimentation. By leading the development and standardization of these technologies, we’re enabling faster innovation, stronger collaboration and more reliable pathways from research to real-world applications."
Andy Hickl, CTO of Allen Institute: “We’ve invested heavily in AI models and autonomous experimentation, but we’re still trying to run them on instruments designed for a human sitting at a bench. That is now the limiting factor. Black-box hardware, closed APIs, and one-off integrations don’t just slow things down — they prevent reproducibility and scale. By calling for open control, design-for-automation, and modular instruments, this paper lays out what’s actually required to move from impressive demos to durable, reproducible, AI-driven discovery. If we want AI to participate directly in experimentation — not just analyze the results after the fact — this is the blueprint.”
Sean Caffrey, Executive Director, Acceleration Consortium: “To fully realize the promise of self-driving labs, we must move beyond bespoke solutions that address specific challenges and toward a standardized ecosystem of automation-ready tools. The Acceleration Consortium supports this call to action because open standards and modular design are critical missing links for generating the high-quality data required to train and validate the AI models that will accelerate scientific discovery. Effective standardization will also allow AI-driven discovery to be adopted broadly, facilitating innovation from the global scientific community.”
Michael Brenner, Harvard University Professor and Research Scientist at Google: “While we have seen tremendous progress in automated scientific pipelines where the substrate is coding or mathematically reasoning, it is clear that the next frontier is extending this to actual experiments. This will require the development of new types of instruments that can be used "in the loop" with automated reasoning.”
Jason Kelly, CEO of Gingko Bioworks: “The fundamental bottleneck of biotechnology today is that scientists must still run most of their experiments by hand at the lab bench. Ginkgo is committed to developing the modular, autonomous scientific instruments described in this paper that will free scientists from the bench and greatly accelerate their rate of discovery. This article is a timely call to action as we enter the era of AI applied to scientific discovery."
About Renaissance Philanthropy
Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit organization that fuels a 21st-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists, and innovators. In the first year, Renaissance Philanthropy catalyzed more than $214M in philanthropic funding for science, technology, and innovation, launching 10+ initiatives across AI, education, climate, health, and scientific infrastructure. The organization designs time-bound, thesis-driven funds led by field experts and inspires talent to take action through playbooks and communities. From accelerating mathematical discovery to expanding talent mobility, Renaissance Philanthropy is building the connective tissue between exceptional ideas and resources to create breakthroughs that transform entire fields.