Distributed AI agents enable comprehensive discovery of biological insights at scale

Distributed biological reasoning assigns many AI agents to individual facets of an experiment and combines their findings for study-wide interpretation. Applied to a whole-brain Perturb-seq atlas, thousands of parallel agents examined the dataset in minutes versus an estimated months of human analysis, recovered a source manuscript's conclusions without seeing it, predicted held-out perturbation effects, and retrieved hundreds of times more references than a single agent. Blinded human experts preferred distributed-agent interpretations over single-agent ones.