GoKawiilConcerns about an AI-induced apocalypse are reaching a fever pitch, from Silicon Valley to Washington, DC.
One of the top theories about how a rogue AI will wipe us out? Biological weapons.
Earlier this summer, AI CEOs called for new laws to control the manufacturing of synthetic DNA. Then last month, researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute showed that AI can design new viral genomes. The idea gained steam last week after Anthropic released a report indicating that there had been efforts to use Claude in ways that “could support biological weapons development. “The report authors cite biological misuse as “one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models.” Shortly thereafter, chief executive officer Dario Amodei urged the government to help AI labs “pace the frontier.”
Despite the alarm around an AI-created killer plague, many scientists say the risk is fairly low on the list of the world’s concerns.
David Bellamy, a research scientist at the Institute of Foundation Models in Sunnyvale, California, does not see AI as a fundamentally new threat when it comes to the creation of bioweapons. The scientific community has grappled for decades with the question of whether to publish potentially dangerous biological research—known as the dual-use dilemma.
Before large language models, the internet itself, open-access science journals, and translation services like Google Translate made it easier for people to access biological information, including lab protocols, Bellamy says.
“AI is essentially a tool that can help both good actors, like scientists, and also threat actors to peruse information more quickly and define and source those protocols more quickly,” he adds. “But those capabilities are not really the bottleneck in the production of bioweapons.”
The real bottleneck, he says, is the process of assembling a virus or other biological agent and the raw materials, equipment, and knowledge that would be needed to do so. A bad actor would need to obtain the necessary gene fragments and build a whole genome from scratch, then verify that the virus can infect humans, cause the desired illness, and be transmissible from person to person. Robotic lab assistants can automate some tasks and speed up workflows to a point, but a person would still need the know-how to run those experiments and the resources to carry them out.
Jason Kelly, the CEO of the biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks, thinks it’s unlikely an artificial general intelligence could commandeer and disseminate existing pathogens, let alone engineer new ones and deploy them. Ginkgo Bioworks specializes in creating autonomous labs and recently ran a project with OpenAI where its GPT-5 model ran a lab.
“The AI could not take over the lab,” he says, in part because the humans who worked inside could simply decline to get the bot whatever substances and equipment it was requesting to physically produce a bioweapon. All those pesky humans acting as checks mean “you’d have to have dramatically more robots all over the place,” he says, for an AGI to be able to deploy machines to do the often-delicate virology work required.
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