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Walk the model: salicylic acid

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Step 1 of 5

Walk SynovAI's retrosynthesis of salicylic acid. The textbook ground truth is the Kolbe-Schmitt: phenol + CO2 under pressure and heat. The model may instead pick hydrolysis of methyl salicylate; both are real industrial routes, and this is the cleanest teaching example of when two textbook answers can both be right.

Step 1: cut this product back to its reactants

Which reactants did the model pick?

Pick the reaction class

Lock in your prediction

Pick the reactants and the reaction class, then submit to see what the model did.