‘Chinese peptides’ are the latest biohacking trend in the tech world
In the backyard of a San Francisco Victorian, tech workers in their 20s and 30s chatted in front of sunshine, grilled meats and a large American flag. An AI founder stated that he buys cheap drugs directly from Chinese manufacturers. A group soon formed around him and joined the conversation to share their own resources on the medications they use for weight loss, productivity, and fitness.
Clark, 27, has been through several injection crazes in the bodybuilding community (a self-proclaimed “gym bro” who posts under the social platform X username @creatine_cycle), but was surprised to hear them being talked about by the AI community.
“One thing I learned during this long weekend in SF is that the elite all have a Chinese peptide dealer,” said Clark, who hosts a podcast about tech culture. he said. The term “Chinese peptides” quickly became a meme.
Gray market peptides have flooded into some corners of the tech scene lately; it showed up at hacker houses, startup offices, and even supplier-sponsored “peptide parties.” A recent event at San Francisco’s Frontier Tower featured a mix-your-own-peptides workshop, a DJ playing techno with chemistry structures projected in the background, and a dress code calling for “crazy futuristic cyberpunk attire.”
Peptides are short chains of amino acids that regulate hormones and reduce inflammation in the human body. These are best known as P in GLP-1s, the class of drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy that have transformed the weight loss industry by mimicking an appetite-suppressing hormone.
But on the fringes of Silicon Valley, a broader array of unproven, unregulated peptides have taken root: People are trying BPC-157 and TB-500 to heal injuries by encouraging the growth of new blood vessels, oxytocin to improve eye contact (an OpenAI researcher has dubbed it “Ozempic for autism”), epithalon for sleep, and retatrutide, a next-generation weight-loss drug still in clinical trials, for everything from appetite suppression to boosting. Imports of hormones and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025, from $164 million in the same period in 2024, according to U.S. customs data. This includes demand from pharmacies and gray market suppliers for GLPs, melanotan II and other peptides.
Except for GLP-1s for weight loss, none have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale for human use. Pharmaceutical companies have been reluctant to invest in peptide trials because most are easy to produce and do not directly target a disease. These conditions encouraged a thriving gray market.
“Every week someone will bring something new and everyone will inject it,” David Petersen, a tech investor and co-founder of logistics unicorn Flexport, told a gathering of biohackers (people who experiment with regimens and supplements to improve their body’s performance) in New York. “It looks like a bunch of heroin addicts,” he joked. He has been using the peptide since 2018 and states that epitalon adds “an hour and a half” of sleep, and melanotan, which increases melanin production, improves rosacea.
The FDA warned that many peptides pose “serious safety risks” due to potential impurities and immune reactions. It also prohibited pharmacies from combining them, although enforcement was uneven.
Personal use is legal, but most doctors advise against it. D., director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a research center focused on individualized medicine. “This is baseless and reckless,” Eric Topol said.
Experimental peptide injections sometimes cause medical emergencies. In July, two women were hospitalized with swollen tongues, difficulty breathing and increased heart rates after receiving peptide injections at an anti-aging festival in Las Vegas. It is unclear which specific peptides they take up.
Yet for some in the tech world, using peptides is a form of belief in the endless possibility of self-healing. Clark said peptides offer some tempting shortcuts: “Why would I be really consistent in the gym for six weeks if I could work 16 hours at my research job?”
But it also reveals the Silicon Valley mentality in which some believe that because they — as innovators shaping our world — are doing their own experiments, they don’t need guidance from federal regulators or medical doctors.
‘For Research Use Only’
The drugs can be purchased directly from factories in China, the world’s peptide production center, or through the websites of U.S. intermediaries that import and test them. They come in powder form in bottles labeled “for research purposes only,” but the warning is a weak legal fiction. Users mix the peptides with sterile water and inject themselves with insulin syringes, often purchased on Amazon.
The economics of off-market peptides are undoubtedly attractive. Prescription GLPs such as Ozempic (semaglutide) and Zepbound (tirzepatide) could until recently cost more than $1,000 per month; “research use” equivalents were one-fifth the cost.
Gerard Olson, director of research at LegitScript, a firm that tracks problematic online marketing of pharmaceutical and other products, said online advertising of unauthorized peptide formulations increased almost eightfold between 2022-24. Dr., a concierge physician in San Francisco. Paul Abramson said he sees a huge increase in peptide use in 2025, especially among young men in the tech industry.
While weight loss is still the most popular reason for peptide use, patients are microdosing (taking very small amounts) GLPs in the hopes that it will help them combat other bad habits, such as alcoholism, excessive video game playing, or online shopping. Although anecdotal accounts may be appealing to some, there are no clinical studies to support microdosing.
“It just seems like an obsession with reaching the cognitive maximum,” said Clark, who remains a peptide skeptic.
Anelya Grant, 41, is the co-founder of an AI billing startup by day and an amateur peptide blogger by night. He started microdosing semaglutide in 2023 after a friend suggested it could reduce work-related stress eating. It was so effective, he said, that he went down the rabbit hole of personal peptide research.
After consulting with a sports performance physician, Grant added five more peptides to his regimen: MOTS-c, epithalon, GHK-Cu, Ipamorelin and Kisspeptin-10. Hoped health benefits include better metabolism, muscle growth, skin, sleep, energy and hormone regulation. He orders them directly from Chinese manufacturers and charges $50 to $100 per kit (one-tenth of what FDA-approved U.S. labs charge), then pays an extra $250 to ship them to Janoshik Analytics, a lab in the Czech Republic, for purity testing.
He laughed when asked if he had a background in biology. “Absolutely not,” he said. Like many peptide enthusiasts, he gets his information primarily from word-of-mouth testimonials, Reddit threads, podcasts, and conversations on ChatGPT. “This is another thing I can tweak in addition to my SEO,” he said.
Some other founders likened their openness to untested peptides to their tolerance for business risks.
Abramson, whom Grant interviewed for an article on his blog, was not very convinced about this. “The parallel in entrepreneurship is not financing a rickety startup,” he told her. “This is transferring funds to an unregistered offshore entity based on a field deck.”
‘Unfounded and irresponsible’
Topol, who discusses these trends in medical misinformation in his Substack newsletter, worries that people are extrapolating the success of GLP-1s to dozens of untested, unrelated peptides, exposing themselves to contamination and long-term health risks in the process.
“There are a lot of dangers in ‘do your own research,’” Topol said. “If they were really good citizen scientists, they would know what the criteria are: randomized, placebo-controlled studies; peer-reviewed publications that are independent of the company. For most of these peptides, we don’t have any of those studies.”
Topol identifies the root cause of such amateur biohacking as growing distrust of the medical establishment, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Where people have lost trust in the FDA, wellness influencers like Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan have brought experimental peptide use into the mainstream, in Rogan’s case sponsored by Ways2Well, a company that sells “clinician-supervised peptide therapy.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, vowed to end the “aggressive suppression” of peptides in an October 2024 X post. (The FDA, under President Joe Biden, has taken enforcement action against some peptide vendors.) But while the Trump administration approved Wegovy’s pill form after adding oral GLP-1s to the FDA’s priority review list, it has not moved to liberalize other types of peptides. An HHS spokesperson said the agency “cannot comment on future policy decisions.”
‘Let the Crazy Try It’
The 29-year-old startup founder had been using prescription GLP-1 for almost two years. His weight dropped, but this was accompanied by frequent depressive swings. “I couldn’t get out of my bed and work,” he said. (He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was concerned that drug use would affect his career prospects. Biohackers who touted their efficiency generally seemed more comfortable speaking publicly than those trying to lose weight, suggesting there is more stigma around the latter.)
For the startup’s founder, the health benefits of losing weight outweighed the risks. He said he felt professional pressure to look good on camera. “I was watching a lot of launch videos,” he said. “I definitely realize now that the founders are not overweight.”
Many off-label peptide users, including this founder, have expressed excitement over what they see as the Trump administration’s relatively laissez-faire approach to drug regulation. This echoes the sentiment of Silicon Valley leaders like Balaji Srinivasan and Joe Lonsdale, who accuse FDA regulators of being overly cautious.
Medical experts are disturbed by this mentality.
Harvard Medical School professor and medical regulatory expert Dr. “The FDA’s goal is to protect patients and consumers from shady medical entrepreneurs selling dangerous things to unsuspecting people,” said Aaron Kesselheim, MD. “I think the evidence suggests that these people are doing things that are bad for their health, which there is no evidence of.”
But from the startup founder’s perspective, “We might all be better off if we let crazy people try crazy peptides and filter them down to the rest of us, instead of a system that lasts 10 years and aims to protect everyone from everything.”
