The specter of AI-enabled bioweapons is a wake-up call for biotech

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both recently argued publicly for slowing AI progress. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon left the company saying neither it nor OpenAI is acting responsibly. The article zooms in on one risk: AI-designed bioweapons. In 2022, researchers used their own molecule generator to produce 40,000 potential chemical warfare agents in under six hours, some more toxic than known nerve agents. Stanford's David Magnus called that finding scary, and things have only escalated since. Today's LLMs can answer questions across all scientific domains; Dunja Sabra at the University of Hamburg says they effectively encode the knowledge of almost every scientist who ever lived, and can provide video training on experiments. Combine that with cheaper gene editing and the DIY-bio movement, and Sabra's assessment is that a determined person would likely succeed eventually. Existing safeguards—DNA screening by synthesis companies, red-teaming and blue-teaming of risky research, and safety tweaks by AI companies—are none of them ironclad.