OpenAI AI chemist (Maria system)

The AI chemist is a research demonstration from OpenAI and Molecule.one in which GPT-5.4 was connected to Maria, an agentic chemistry AI integrated with a high-throughput laboratory (Maria Lab) for autonomous research. Given an open-ended goal of improving one of several important reaction classes, the system generated and ranked thousands of research proposals, translated selected plans into lab instructions, ran experiments, analyzed the data and proposed follow-up experiments.

Humans stayed in the loop: they wrote steering and grading prompts, selected four proposals to test, made limited corrections to experimental plans, assisted with basic lab operations and independently validated the final result. The most promising proposal (OAI-M1-03) targeted Chan–Lam coupling of primary sulfonamides with boronic acids. GPT-5.4 suggested mild oxidants such as TEMPO as an additive. Across two experimental cycles (10,080 reactions), yields improved for 88% of boronic acids and 83% of sulfonamides tested. Mean yield rose from 16.6% to 25.2%, and the share of reactions above 30% yield rose from 15.6% to 37.5%.

Human chemists repeated representative reactions at bench scale and saw higher yields for 11 of 14 substrate pairs. OpenAI describes this as an early result. The system is a research collaboration, not a publicly available product, and no public access, pricing or API for Maria was described in the provided material.