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 ta…