AI professors compare their position to "being a biologist in a world where private companies had exclusive control over CRISPR."

MIT Technology Review's reporting from the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 convening finds academics restructuring research agendas around what frontier labs won't share. Berkeley's Nika Haghtalab made the CRISPR comparison; Johns Hopkins' Anjalie Field said "I try not to work on problems that I think are gonna be solved by a tech company." The structural problem is access: neither Anthropic nor OpenAI grants external researchers detailed visibility into design and training, compounded by reduced federal funding and a talent drain. This is the supply-side story behind every frontier-lab hiring headline, and it matters because independent evaluation of frontier models has to come from somewhere.