How to Defend Against AI-Designed Viruses– warontherocks.com

Anthropic recently disclosed five cases in which users hid their countries while asking Claude for help enhancing pathogens or toxins. This added fuel to the ongoing debate over whether progress in AI should be slowed. Insider warnings of threats to human lives from artificial intelligence have been received as everything from prescient humility to a hoax or marketing stunt. But in a world where AI-designed biological viruses have already been grown in the lab, the threats should be reckoned with in any biodefense strategy.

The “AI doomer” model of biological risks is that AI will develop intelligence beyond that of any human, leading it to invent a supervirus so much more powerful and fatal than anything in the world that our civilization will collapse. Adherents name this “x-risk.” An opposite view is that virus design is such a hard problem that AI won’t add anything beyond what the best humans can do, and that malicious actors — even state actors — would require access to so much top expertise that production is unfeasible.

Doomerism justifies unrealistic and destabilizing solutions (like bombing data centers) while the dismissiveness of certain biologists — including some, like Claus Wilke and David Bellamy, who are AI experts with experience in synthetic virus design — fosters a complacency that leaves us vulnerable to AI threats.