Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Published online: 07 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41573-026-01496-2 Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery have attracted high interest in recent years, but evidence for clinically relevant impact so far is limited. This Perspective discusses potential reasons, including an insufficient focus on clinical translation during model development and difficulties with applying AI algorithms on conditional life science data, and provides recommendations for the development of AI in drug discovery.