Robot on Rails, OpenAI and Red Queen Bio test AI-directed wet-lab research

Evidence notes

• The collaboration connected GPT-5 protocol design with Robot on Rails hardware executing molecular-cloning experiments on a conventional lab bench.
• The AI-generated protocol improved the target metric 79-fold, while robotic execution produced a 2.13-fold experimental improvement and reached 89% of the relative performance achieved by a human scientist.
• Absolute colony counts remained about ten times lower than the human baseline, providing important context on the gap between relative optimisation and end-to-end laboratory performance.