Alnylam and Inceptive Nucleics announced a three-year strategic collaboration focused on using AI foundation models to accelerate RNAi therapeutics discovery. The partnership is valued at up to $2 billion, including a $30 million upfront payment in cash and equity, with additional payments tied to preclinical, regulatory, and commercial milestones. Inceptive, led by former Google Brain executive Jakob Uszkoreit, is building reusable “AI foundation models of life” intended to learn biology in a way that can transfer across tasks. Alnylam framed the agreement as its first discovery-focused AI deal, betting that model-driven search can shorten the path from target selection to candidate identification.