Alnylam agreed a three-year, up-to-$2 billion strategic collaboration with Inceptive Nucleics, the AI startup co-founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, creator of the transformer architecture behind ChatGPT. The partnership is designed to apply AI foundation models to RNA interference (RNAi) drug discovery and development. Alnylam will pay $30 million upfront in cash and equity, with additional milestone payments tied to co-discovered drugs advancing through preclinical, regulatory, and commercial stages. The deal signals growing pharma reliance on AI systems positioned to generate and optimize RNAi candidates across multiple tasks. The companies framed the collaboration as discovery-focused, leveraging Inceptive’s “biological foundation models” for RNA sequence-based medicines.