AI made finding a longevity drug fast and cheap. It has done nothing to the clinical proof that decides whether it pays, and capital is racing ahead anyway. What's real, what's priced on faith, and what investors are actually buying in 2026.

The polite version of longevity is sleep, supplements and zone-two cardio. The frontier that actually moved capital this past year was stranger, and far more investable: cellular reprogramming reached its first patient, pharmaceutical capital moved into aging biology, and the field's harder questions, from embryo editing to the unregulated edge, came into the open. A clear-eyed look at how to tell a genuine breakthrough from an expensive one.