I’m not sure a marginal bioterrorist can train an AI model to obfuscate a DNA sequence to bypass the sequence scanning, but I concede it’s definitely easier to do than recode an organism. I’m not really sure what the skillset/resources of a marginal bioterrorist are.
But we should watch out for proliferation/commercialization of recoded organisms, since recoded organisms would be easier to recode further (if they introduce a new codon, just modify the synthetase to load a different amnio acid).
A marginal bioterrorist could probably just brew up a vat of anthrax which technically counts. Advanced labs definitely have more capacity for modification, but they still need to source the pathogens.
Yes—they made a huge number of mistakes, despite having sophisticated people and tons of funding. It’s been used over and over to make the claim that bioweapons are really hard—but I do wonder how much using an LLM for help would avoid all of these classes of mistake. (How much prosaic utility is there for project planning in general? Some, but at high risk if you need to worry about detection, and it’s unclear that most people are willing to offload or double check their planning, despite the advantages.)
I’m not sure a marginal bioterrorist can train an AI model to obfuscate a DNA sequence to bypass the sequence scanning, but I concede it’s definitely easier to do than recode an organism. I’m not really sure what the skillset/resources of a marginal bioterrorist are.
But we should watch out for proliferation/commercialization of recoded organisms, since recoded organisms would be easier to recode further (if they introduce a new codon, just modify the synthetase to load a different amnio acid).
A marginal bioterrorist could probably just brew up a vat of anthrax which technically counts. Advanced labs definitely have more capacity for modification, but they still need to source the pathogens.
Perhaps worth nothing that they’ve tried in the past, and failed.
It seems they were literally using the nonpathogenic attenuated anthrax strain used for vaccines.
Yes—they made a huge number of mistakes, despite having sophisticated people and tons of funding. It’s been used over and over to make the claim that bioweapons are really hard—but I do wonder how much using an LLM for help would avoid all of these classes of mistake. (How much prosaic utility is there for project planning in general? Some, but at high risk if you need to worry about detection, and it’s unclear that most people are willing to offload or double check their planning, despite the advantages.)