Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research.

Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July, 2026 on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns – private companies valued at more than $1 billion – have never played a leading role in publishing a scientific paper or preprint, according to the new analysis. Collectively, they accounted for just one in every 1000 AI papers published in 2025.

More than half of the startups had never produced a single qualifying paper, the analysis revealed. Scientific influence proved even more concentrated, with the top 5% of firms accounting for greater than 90% of all citations. For example, despite OpenAI employing roughly 4500 people, only eight researchers had authored five or more qualifying papers.
 

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-s-top-startups-are-barely-publishing-their-research

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