AI can fuel biological weapons. We must harness its power for defense
Annie Jacobsen
The offensive potential is no longer theoretical. We need to develop systems to strengthen public health as quickly as AI is accelerating biological design
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the biological sciences, it is pushing the future of biology in two opposing directions. AI can help bad actors generate recipes for biological weapons with just a few keystrokes and computational prompts. At the same time, AI can track disease outbreaks and deliver critical public health information to millions of people in real time – potentially stopping a deadly outbreak in its tracks. What we are dealing with in this moment is profound: a race between offense and defense. Between the proliferation of dark biology, where deadly pathogens are engineered in secret, and the promise of a new era of collective global health.
Every infectious disease outbreak begins with a handful of cases. Public health wins by learning about an outbreak before it spreads wide, before hospitals fill and a crisis starts to spiral out of control. As transmission rates explode, options shrink. One of AI’s greatest values is its ability to compress the timeline between outbreak and detection. Speed can mean the difference between containing an outbreak and confronting an epidemic, or another global pandemic
The World Health Organization (WHO) now uses AI to track the spread of infectious disease. At the WHO’s Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, in Berlin, Germany, computational systems leverage artificial intelligence and pathogenic surveillance to track and monitor infectious disease outbreaks around the world. At the center of this new way forward sits a computer-based system called Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources, or Eios (“EE-oss”), which acts as a giant filter for the world’s minute-by-minute health information.
For decades, traditional epidemic intelligence has relied on official case counts. But data from hospitals, labs, research groups and other formal reporting systems takes days or weeks to register and input into official databases. Eios leverages the colossal power of modern computing and social media to get a more immediate picture of a disease outbreak. Eios focuses on unofficial reports, citizen chatter, local news reports, social media posts and more. Proficient across multiple languages, Eios scans millions of websites, feeds and platforms, searching for outbreaks as they happen. It scrapes, filters and ranks information. The goal of Eios is to pull signal from noise.
AI is a force multiplier, changing the biological sciences every day. The real question is not whether AI can do catastrophic harm in the realm of biological sciences – it most certainly can – but whether public health officials can figure out how to deploy AI as a defensive tool faster than malicious actors deploy it as an offensive one
The offensive potential is no longer theoretical. AI systems can already help researchers navigate enormous bodies of biological knowledge that once required years of specialized training. They can explain complex laboratory techniques, locate obscure scientific literature, troubleshoot technical problems and suggest experimental designs. None of these capabilities is inherently dangerous. Together, however, they lower the barrier to entering what was once a highly specialized field
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The greatest concern is that AIs can help humans create genuinely novel, or new, forms of biology. Scientists are already exploring these possibilities, from mirror-image life to organisms designed with capabilities that do not already exist in nature. Until recently, these possibilities were largely confined to theory or science fiction. Biology is unlike any other technology because what it produces can reproduce, spread across borders, mutate, and evolve on its own. A software bug crashes a computer. A biological mistake can become self-propagating. Once a living organism is released into the world, it cannot simply be switched off or recalled. That biological weapons are alive is what makes them fundamentally different from every other class of weapon, from the arrow to the ICBM.
The race has already begun. As I cover in my forthcoming book Biological War, and this recent New York Times article outlines, biological weapons have an extremely low barrier to entry. Unlike nuclear weapons, which require tightly controlled fissile material and complex delivery systems, biological weapons can be built with widely available laboratory tools, aided by increasingly powerful AI systems
The technology to engineer life is advancing faster than the existing laws, treaties and safeguards meant to govern it. This widening gap is where existential danger lives. The point is pressure, not panic. We need to develop AI systems to strengthen public health, accelerate disease detection and help build biological defenses as quickly as AI is accelerating biological design. Because once biology outruns our ability to contain it, there is no recalling what has already been unleashed upon the world.
Annie Jacobsen is the author of Biological War, to be published on 28 July by Dutton. She also wrote the Pulitzer prize–finalist in history The Pentagon’s Brain and the New York Times bestsellers Nuclear War, Area 51 and Operation Paperclip
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