Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks, responding to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's claim that major diseases will be a thing of the past within ten years, says that would be great but is unlikely.

Concept illustration on a pink background: a brick-red path runs from the bottom edge to a vanishing point at the centre, with a long row of hospital beds on each side receding into the distance, patients lying in them and capsules on some of the small bedside tables, and a sign lettered HUMAN TRIALS at the front of the left row. At left, a desk holds a laptop whose screen shows a speech-bubble icon, a rack of three test tubes and a tray of dark pills, above a sign lettered LILLY and, in red script, Lilly; at right, a person seen from behind stands at a lectern facing a screen with a play button, with a sign in front lettered ANTHROPIC and an angular mark beside the word; a large thought bubble at the top holds an empty hospital bed and bedside table, and its trail of small circles leads down to the right toward that screen; a large black quotation mark sits in the top-right corner; a hand in a dark sleeve reaches in from the lower left with its index finger pointing up and to the right toward the path; and a single capsule lies on the path near the bottom. Printed on the image: Ricks cites randomized human trials as the slowest step.

Ricks offers this as his personal judgment, citing randomized human trials as the slowest step, and Lilly itself invests heavily in AI drug research. Amodei's remark comes from a video connected with Anthropic's IPO, reposted by a third-party account. Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University and a longtime critic of large language models, also posted against Anthropic's IPO on November 10. Marcus cites Ricks's response to argue that claims like this during an IPO should face securities-law scrutiny (Gary Marcus, 2026-11-12; Dave Ricks, 2026-11-11). Marcus doesn't say whether the IPO registration statement contains the same words. How we checked →

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This item ran in the brief of Nov 13, 2026, alongside 16 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

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SecondSource (2026). "Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks, responding to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's claim that major diseases will be a thing of the past within ten years, says that would be great but is unlikely.." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-11-13-2/. Accessed access date.