OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is the lead investor in Red Queen Bio, a startup focused on preventing the creation of biological weapons enabled by artificial intelligence. OpenAI's $15 million seed round investment is part of its broader strategy to support startups mitigating AI risks. The company aims to ensure that AI industry defenses evolve as rapidly as those seeking to misuse AI for harmful purposes.
Anthropic leaders have also invested in Red Queen Bio. The startup's co-founder, Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finnish physicist and serial entrepreneur, explained that the company was formed after an experiment at OpenAI. In early 2025, an OpenAI model (o3) designed an mRNA therapeutic cocktail for a mouse cancer model that matched 18 months of human lab work. However, red-teaming the same model revealed its potential to design novel pathogens, a "frightening" result that prompted the creation of Red Queen Bio.
Red Queen Bio is building a "civilizational adaptive immune system" across three layers: diversity generation (antibody design against novel pathogens), target identification (using reasoning models to determine critical epitopes from pathogen sequences), and rapid manufacturing and deployment (to enable quick countermeasure distribution). The company, a public benefit corporation with 20 employees and a wet lab, plans to use commercial applications in autoimmune disease and oncology as capability-building exercises, anticipating that its primary customer will be government biodefense. Red Queen Bio's relationship with OpenAI is structured to allow collaboration with all frontier AI labs.
