Recent decades have seen massive amounts of biological and medical data becoming available in digital form. The computerization of lab equipment, digitization of medical records, and advent of cheap DNA sequencing all generate data, which is increasingly collected in large data sets available to researchers.

This bounty of data is driving rapid progress in AI. In combination with increasingly cheap and powerful DNA synthesis and laboratory automation, AI promises to deliver revolutionary advances in medicine via rapid design-build-test cycles. However, the same capabilities that are driving everything from drug discovery to diagnostic techniques could also revolutionize bioterrorism, with plausible scenarios ranging from a flu-level virus to a pandemic with an impact exceeding Covid.

Fortunately, there is much that can be done to mitigate the risk of an AI-assisted pandemic. This is often framed as a conflict between progress and safety, but that needn’t be the case. Many mitigations are simply sensible public health measures, such as improved ventilation in public spaces. Where it is necessary to manage the development of AI capabilities, this can be done in a targeted manner. We have the opportunity to simultaneously improve public health, reduce the risk of pandemics, and smooth the path for progress.

How AI Could Enable Bioterrorism

There are multiple paths through which advances in AI could lead to the deliberate release of a harmful virus. One scenario hinges on the fact, not widely recognized, that the genetic sequences for tens of thousands of human viruses (presenting varying degrees of danger) are already widely available.^[1] Advances in DNA/RNA synthesis make it theoretically possible for a disturbed or radicalized individual to recreate a virus; the greatest barrier is knowledge of lab techniques.^[2] For many viruses, that barrier is surprisingly low. If the individual had managed to identify a particularly dangerous virus, tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths could result, comparable to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.^[3]

Future chatbots seem likely to be capable of lowering the bar to such an attack. As models become increasingly “multimodal”, their training data will soon include video, such as university lectures and lab demonstrations. Such systems would not be limited to providing written instructions; they c...

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