When Google Locked the Door, Three MIT Students Picked the Lock

When Google restricted commercial use of AlphaFold 3, three MIT PhD students reverse-engineered it and launched Boltz. They released their version under an open-source license, allowing anyone to use it commercially. Boltz secured a $28M seed round, a Pfizer partnership, and aims to provide open-source infrastructure for drug discovery. The company charges for enterprise services rather than the models themselves. While Boltz-2 matches AlphaFold 3 in accuracy, it runs 1,000 times faster and at a fraction of the cost. However, AI-discovered drugs still face the same high failure rates in clinical trials as traditional methods.