Stanford is running 37,000 AI agents as a virtual biotech — and one of its drug designs got independently confirmed by Merck

For developers, the operating assumption has been one engineer, one agent — the model Claude Code and similar tools. At VB Transform 2026, James Zou, associate professor of biomedical data science at Stanford University, argued that assumption is about to break: the next frontier isn't a single, more capable agent, it's tens of thousands of them collaborating.For developers and product builders, the most critical takeaway from Zou’s presentation is how these massive systems are orchestrated. His team's research offers a practical blueprint for connecting legacy databases to AI orchestration layers and designing environments that enable thousands of agents to collaborate.Emulating the organization — the virtual biotechZou’s project began as a "Virtual Lab" consisting of five to eight agents