Arthur Holland Michael

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

Arthur Holland Michael, Rosie Blau

Advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly lowering the barrier for non-state actors to engineer biological weapons by providing expert-level troubleshooting and access to global scientific literature. While current technology cannot yet generate novel pathogens without existing data sets, it effectively enables skilled individuals to modify existing viruses, thereby eliminating the traditional bottleneck of expert collaboration. Policymakers and developers are currently striving to implement robust refusal mechanisms and pre-release regulatory assessments to counter these evolving threats before malicious actors can exploit model vulnerabilities.