Lila Sciences’ AI-run lab screens 2,942 catalysts and finds iridium- and ruthenium-free palladium oxides for green hydrogen
Awaiting review
The takeaway
On 25 Sept 2026 Lila Sciences reported that its AI-directed autonomous lab proposed, synthesized and screened 2,942 oxide catalysts (53 material systems, 26 elements) for the acidic oxygen evolution reaction used in PEM water electrolysis.
Status
- Claim
Awaiting review
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Verification
- Preprint only
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra148 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.587 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen178 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7117 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 87 days before it.
Key facts
- 2,942 catalysts across 53 material systems and 26 elements; 6 Pd-based families on or near the Pareto front (e.g. InMnPdOx, NiTaPdOx)
- Lead composition performed comparably to ruthenium in activity after 1,000+ hours of stability testing (company claim)
- Palladium had been widely considered a dead end for acidic OER
- Bayesian models combined with language models chose experiments; humans handled safety review and some manual sample transfers; Lila claims ~17x faster screening and >90% less human time per sample
- Preprint: Jenewein et al., 21 authors, all Lila Sciences, submitted 24 Sept 2026
- Company context: Flagship Pioneering spin-out; $550M raised by Oct 2025 (incl. NVentures), valuation >$1.3B; Bloomberg (3 June 2026) reported talks to raise ~$2B at ~$8.5B pre-money
What happened
Lila’s autonomous materials lab ran closed-loop campaigns in which AI models proposed oxide compositions. Robotic sputtering and electrochemical stations made and tested them, and the results fed back into the models. The AI pushed into palladium compositions that experts had largely written off and found stable, active catalysts without iridium or ruthenium.
Why it matters
It is one of the first concrete, data-backed discovery claims from the heavily funded “scientific superintelligence” startups. It addresses a real bottleneck for gigawatt-scale green hydrogen, where iridium supply is scarce. It is still a company preprint and needs peer review and industrial-scale testing.
What is disputed or not yet verified
| Verification | Preprint only (arXiv 2609.30133); not peer-reviewed |
|---|
Sources
6 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
6 sources: 3 primary, 3 press
Primary
- Lila: How an AI-run lab cracked open green hydrogen’s catalyst problemlila.ai, official
- arXiv 2609.30133: AI-guided high-throughput discovery of Ir- and Ru-free palladium-oxide catalystsarxiv.org, paper
- Lila: $350M Series A announcementlila.ai, official
Press
- Unite.AI: Lila Sciences’ AI lab uncovers palladium catalysts for green hydrogenunite.ai, press
- Bloomberg: Lila Sciences said in talks for funds at $8.5B valuationbloomberg.com, press
- MIT Technology Review: AI materials-discovery startups (Dec 2025)technologyreview.com, press
Changes
- Filed