Top postsTop post
WHAT: Plant ‘fund biodefense’ into the infosphere of venture capital partners. WHY: Biological risk, successful weaponization of science by non-state actors, is becoming more possible. From the perspective of VCs, these threats also present neglected market opportunity, though the interventions do stratify by feasibility, with some being more VC-shaped than...
Anthropic released a mythos variant, Fable, with stricter safeguards for life-science and cyber queries. Instead of trying to identify the small subset of scientific questions that look weaponizable, they reroute these queries broadly, however benign they may be, even something as basic as, “What is biology?” These queries are blocked...
A group of bionerds assembled at the London Initiative for Safe AI for a hackathon aimed at reducing biorisk. Our team produced this in under 48 hours. TL;DR Responsible contract research organizations, that perform DNA synthesis as a service, should screen customer requests prior to executing the work order. Likewise,...
> When your vision of what you want to do is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision, the farther into management you have to go. > > — Richard Hamming, You and Your Research (7 March 1986)...
Is it true or is it useful? We want to know the capabilities of our machines to understand their utility. Likewise, we must evaluate them to be aware of emerging threats. Cybersecurity suites, agentic coding benchmarks, and mathematic reasoning are tractable areas for pre-deployment testing. But scientific ability proves much...
Why I’m betting my career on dangerous science “The nation and Laboratory are faced with several growing security threats, and there is a pressing need to focus our research and development efforts to address these challenges, […] We strongly believe that research and development in biology, biomedical systems, biological defense,...
Language models offer Americans an overlooked benefit: direct access to information beyond the Anglosphere. Despite the internet’s global reach, we’ve confined ourselves to English-language sources, relying on secondhand reports we treat as authentic, but which are better understood as merely uncontested. Last year, I wrote about two high-ranking Russian agents...