“Nature is the world’s worst bioterrorist” is a common maxim in the field of biosecurity, a reference to the idea that naturally emerging pathogens cause far more deaths than any biological attack a terrorist could carry out. But the trope may soon be outdated. In an article published Aug. 6 in the journal Science, scientists demonstrated that trained AI models can design novel viruses as well as—if not better than—nature itself.
Their experiment created viruses that infect bacteria, not humans. Still, much like the multiple AI models that escaped their test environments to hack other networks this summer, these newly revealed capabilities give biosecurity experts like me pause. How do we keep enabling legitimate scientific progress, while also preventing AI from assisting in the creation of biological weapons?
As AI capabilities advance, viral bioweapons could become much easier to design and produce and could cause even more harm than the weapons used in the past. Consider that almost all the bioterrorist attacks in our modern era have involved substances like anthrax or ricin. While they’ve harmed dozens of people at a time, the illnesses these attacks caused weren’t transmissible between humans. Designing novel viruses, on the other hand, could enable biological attacks that spread, infections that leap from person to person and that could even spark a pandemic. To prevent this outcome, we need to build mechanisms for restricting access to the tools, data, and materials that might allow someone to misuse emerging capabilities in this way. And we should also go further by building defenses that can deter nefarious activity in the first place. …
The remainder of this commentary is available at thebulletin.org.
