Introduction

As artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize scientific research, the world is facing an unprecedented challenge in biosecurity. While AI's ability to democratize expert knowledge represents a remarkable achievement, it also lowers the barriers for malicious actors to create bioweapons. This threat operates across multiple scales - from individual actors with basic lab skills to organized terrorist groups and authoritarian states. Unlike traditional bioterrorism risks, which already required extensive expertise and resources, AI-assisted bioweapon development could potentially be pursued by anyone with access to standard lab equipment and the right language models. This post explores a three-layered defense strategy, examining how we can implement security measures at the conception, production, and diffusion stages of potential pathogens. Through a combination of traditional biosecurity measures, robust AI system design, and defensive AI applications, we might be able to mitigate these emerging risks without having to sacrifice the beneficial aspects of AI-assisted scientific research.

I) Designing

Current LLMs capabilities

Today, LLMs are already good and reliable guides to point to the sources you need and explain difficult concepts in simple words. With general-purpose AIs models like ChatGPT or Llama 2 being open source models, you can easily fine-tune or find fine-tuned versions of those models that haven’t been censored. In that case, such models can enable you to synthesize expert knowledge about the deadliest known pathogens, such as influenza and smallpox [1].

That is exactly what a group of students from MIT have done to prove this point [2]. During a hackathon, participants were asked to discover how to obtain and release 1918 Spanish flu by feeding both Llama 2 and an uncensored “Spicy” version with malicious prompts. While Llama 2 systematically denied answers, the Spicy model easily provided a step by step guide revealing key information to obtain the virus.

Studies haven’t already been designed to evaluate precisely how much uplift AI systems can provide in such misuses compared to using the internet only. However, given the time that the non-scientific students of the MIT took to complete the entire malicious process we can reasonably think that the uplift is sufficient to raise...

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