“It is impossible for AI to access a fully autonomous lab and autonomously build a virus today because fully autonomous labs do not exist yet,” says Olivia Scharfman, a biotechnology fellow at the technology think tank Institute for Progress. “But I do think that an AI could pay someone to do it for them.”
She thinks AI-assisted bioterrorism is an immediate threat and that there are some groups that might be nihilistic enough to do so, including “transhumanist AI successionists,” people who buy into a fringe ideology who hope to supplant humans with bots.
Other experts aren’t so worried about an AI bioweapon because they don’t think that biological warfare makes much sense methodologically. “The risks tend to be somewhat misunderstood,” genetic biologist and professor of computational biology Francois Belloux tells WIRED, noting that people tend to “overestimate the value of pathogens as weapons.”
Setting aside the AGI of it all, Belloux says that bioweapons are simply not an especially attractive choice for aspiring genocidaires, especially as it’s difficult to target certain groups and spare others, and mass-producing and distributing pathogens is logistically complicated versus, say, launching a bomb. “If you want to kill people, there are much, much, much better ways to kill them than to try to engineer some virus or bacterium and then release it,” he says—whether you’re the most sophisticated artificial mind ever created or just a regular human.
With AI bringing the threat of bioweapons into focus, Scharfman says this is the right moment to push for better protections against all biological threats, including existing pathogens like H1N1. That could include high-level actions like passing legislation to enhance security protocols around DNA synthesis technology, but she also advocates for changes to mitigate risk from all viruses, like upgrading air purification systems in buildings.
Whether AI demonstrably raises the risk of bioweapon development is a hard question to answer, says Steph Guerra, head of AI and bio at Rand Corporation, a policy think tank. “AI has been shown to be very good at integrating information together and being motivational to people for doing good and bad things,” she says.
Even if the risk is low, Guerra says, there are still ways that society can protect against potential misuse. One is that governments can adopt laws requiring firms that sell synthetic DNA and RNA to screen customers and orders to prevent the misuse of genetic material. Many companies already use software to screen orders for so-called “sequences of concern,” but the practice is not universal or mandated.
Before a bad actor could get to that point, though, most everyone agrees that models should have appropriate safeguards in place so that they don’t provide actionable, dangerous information to people.
Guerra says the risk of an AI-developed biothreat can also be mitigated by strengthening global surveillance systems to detect outbreaks of new diseases and circulating pathogens to researchers as early as possible. She says data-sharing protocols across AI companies, gene synthesis providers, and the government could also help prevent misuse.
“With pretty much almost any biosecurity control, there are going to be ways that they can be circumvented,” she says. “That’s why we need layered approaches that provide friction across the entire pathway, from ideation to intention of a bad actor, all the way to the release of a bioweapon.”
Unutmaz says there’s an even more pressing worry: that all the AI doom conversations are diverting attention from how cutting-edge systems can assist humans in vaccine development and other medical breakthroughs.
“We really need to focus on the positive aspect of it,” he says.