Experts warn AI could make biological weapons easier to develop

Leaders at Anthropic and OpenAI recently acknowledged that advancing AI involves serious risks. Experts cited by MIT Technology Review Brasil fear that models capable of answering scientific questions and providing instructions, combined with more accessible gene-editing and synthetic-biology tools, could help design or produce biological weapons.

In 2022, researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals found that a molecule generator created to search for medicines produced 40,000 molecules with potential use in chemical warfare in less than six hours; some were designed to be more toxic than known nerve agents. Dunja Sabra, a biosecurity researcher at the University of Hamburg, said combining these technologies with “do-it-yourself” biology laboratories creates a potentially dangerous situation. David Magnus, a professor at Stanford University, described the experiment as very frightening.