The thing with drug discovery is that the bottleneck is not coming up with new molecules, etc. It's the multi-year, extremely expensive clinical trials that often don't even succeed. I doubt it will be a big moneymaker for Anthropic and OpenAI, because the best they can hope for is to sell a software product to pharma companies, but the pharma companies already have lots of scientists with a million promising molecules already in study they will never even make it to clinical trials.
In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
If you had asked HN 3 years ago what would code-generating market would be, they would have used the exact same reasoning and given us the opinion "Why no one will pay for glorified auto-complete"
Thr pharma parallel to what tech is doing is replacing clinical trials with AI review. Im not so sure its the same thing.
The idea that AI curing cancer, heart disease, aging (you get the idea) won't be a money maker because "clinical trials" is absurd. Of course it will be. Obviously it isn't the same thing as coding agents. But a lot of money makers aren't the same things as coding agents.
In order to cure cancer with AI, you would need to give it complete control over the experimental pipeline, including probably direct robotic access to a web lab, which comes with its own set of risks. It's just not the same problem space as coding at all.