More than one million researchers have used AlphaFold in the 18 months since DeepMind made it freely available.

Judged as of 2023-02-01. True: DeepMind, EMBL-EBI or independent figures show more than 1 million researchers or users made use of AlphaFold (e.g. the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database) between its free release in July 2021 and about early 2023. Mostly true: the figure is roughly 1 million but the measure is slightly different (for example unique users or users in 190 countries rather than 'researchers'), or the period differs a little from 18 months. Mostly false: the figure exceeds 1 million only on a much looser measure (for example page views or downloads instead of people), or it is well short. False: the documented users are far below 1 million.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Case study: AlphaFold uses open data and AI to discover the 3D protein universe EMBL-EBI · 9 February 2023

   “In early 2022, the number of researchers accessing the database since launch was up to to nearly one million, with these users viewing 3 million protein structures.”

2. E2 AlphaFold predicts structure of almost every catalogued protein known to science EMBL-EBI · 28 July 2022

   “In just over a year, more than 1,000 scientific papers have cited the database and over 500,000 researchers from over 190 countries have accessed the AlphaFold Database to view over two million structures.”

3. E3 AlphaFold two years on: Validation and impact PubMed Central (NCBI) · 12 August 2024

   “The AlphaFold Database has had 1.6 million unique visitors from more than 190 countries, and the whole archive has been downloaded over 23,000 times as of January 2024”

4. E4 AlphaFold predicts structure of almost every catalogued protein known to science EMBL-EBI · 28 July 2022 Own record

   “We’ve been amazed by the rate at which AlphaFold has already become an essential tool for hundreds of thousands of scientists in labs and universities across the world,”

E1, an EMBL-EBI case study published in February 2023, says the number of researchers who had accessed the AlphaFold Database since launch was "nearly one million". It dates that figure to "early 2022", but E2 gives over 500,000 researchers in July 2022, so the date in E1 does not fit with E2 and may refer to a later point. The wider trend fits a figure of about one million by early 2023: over 500,000 researchers by July 2022 (E2) and 1.6 million unique visitors by January 2024 (E3). The documented figure is roughly 1 million rather than clearly over it, and it counts researchers who accessed the AlphaFold Database rather than all use of AlphaFold, so the claim is mostly true.