Creating deadly human viruses will get easier with AI | The Economist

TL;DR

AI provides dangerous 'uplift' to people with biology backgrounds, potentially enabling bioterrorism by acting as an infinitely knowledgeable scientific tutor.

Key Points

• 1.AI has surpassed human expert virologists on complex biology tasks. Leading language models now outperform experts on bioinformatics and troubleshooting, acting like an infinitely patient tutor with knowledge of every published scientific paper.
• 2.The biggest risk is not novices but people with biology PhDs. Studies show novices gain little lab uplift from AI, while someone with a molecular biology PhD combined with AI could effectively replicate the output of very large expert teams — the key bottleneck for bioterrorism.
• 3.Creating a totally new pathogen is not yet possible, but modifying existing viruses is. A 2024 government study found novel pathogen creation requires unavailable datasets, but an expert could potentially engineer a modified respiratory virus, infect themselves, and spread it via airplane or public spaces.
• 4.Safeguards exist but can be easily bypassed by motivated actors. Mitigations include refusal mechanisms, removing sensitive training data, and restricting model access; governments can audit capabilities pre-release, but current refusal systems are already circumventable.