Swedish researchers build an AI scientist that runs its own experiments

Researchers in Sweden have built an AI system that can run the full scientific method on its own. It forms a hypothesis, designs an experiment, runs it with robots, and interprets the results, all with minimal human input. The test subject was humble: brewer’s yeast. The system still found a protective effect that human researchers had not previously noticed. How the AI scientist works The work comes from Chalmers University of Technology, with collaborators from the University of Gothenburg. Affiliations also include the University of Cambridge. The findings were published on September 30, 2026, in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Contributors include postdoctoral researcher Ievgeniia Tiukova, Professor Ross D. King, Daniel Brunnsåker and Alexander H. Gower. The team describes the setup as a closed-loop system. It takes a reading, acts on it, checks what happened, and adjusts. Here, the readings are experimental results and the adjustments are new hypotheses. The system pairs modern large language models with automated reasoning. The language models help generate ideas. The reasoning layer keeps those ideas tied to logic and existing evidence. Underneath sits a large kn...