Meta: The potential proliferation of biological weapons is serious. Millions could die. It's easy to joke about before it happens, but try to imagine how this thread might look after the successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state or non-state actor. I encourage you to take this topic seriously and contribute posts that add new information or perspectives to the discussion.
(I myself think the odds of a bioweapon attack remain low and have not yet been seriously accelerated by LLMs, but this is absolutely something the world should pay attention to.)
This already plausibly happened, at the end of 2019, or at least close enough to have the same outcome. We know what happens: half the population declares that avoiding the bioweapon is "woke" and then goes out and infects themselves on purpose. Now imagine if it was 50 times deadlier.
IMO you should disclose that you are an OpenAI employee if you're going to try and shape the contours of public discussion in a lecturing tone.
[flagged]
Damn, it's not even 1am and I got my first FFS of the day.
Is end of days cultism a prerequisite to working at an LLM company?
I miss the optimism of 20 years ago.
> I miss the optimism of 20 years ago.
I too wish my marks were still as gullible and trusting as they were before I scammed them.
Hey guys its Sam here, has everyone met their LLM Token Quota? If so, spend the rest of the day posting doom on your socials, thanks.
It's the usual propaganda. They want to insinuate how powerful their models are and achieve government regulation. Win-win.
Is this belief falsifiable? Consider e.g. the fact that Daniel Kokotajlo left OpenAI due to his concerns even though it meant leaving equity on the table.
Are you commenting on the wrong thread? This isn't about somebody leaving.
There will always be people leaving companies because they don't believe in them anymore.
It seems unwise to dismiss whistleblowers.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O0R5!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I don't think knowing how to build a bio weapon means one could actually build a bio weapon. It's like saying knowing how to build a nuclear weapon can easily lead to building a nuclear weapon.
Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment. Also one would need lethal viruses to even start with and that's not something you can order off of amazon. Further, even to build a chemical weapon, the compounds needed are strictly controlled almost in every country and I would assume any suspicious purchase or order would immediately raise a flag or alert in national security service in respective country.
> Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment. Also one would need lethal viruses to even start with and that's not something you can order off of amazon.
This is laughably misinformed. You can in fact build a bio weapon in a glorified shed if you know what you're doing. However it will be quite involved, requiring experience on the bench and a great deal of attention to small details. In short an LLM can't suddenly morph you into a molecular biology lab tech with 5+ years of experience.
Meanwhile as with any STEM discipline the educational process effectively serves as a screen for being a reasonably well adjusted adult.
> Further, even to build a chemical weapon, the compounds needed are strictly controlled almost in every country
You can synthesize from basic precursors but you will hit the same issue as above. You will need actual experience on the bench and the process of getting that is going to screen out the vast majority of would be bad actors. (Notably it failed to screen out the members of Aum Shinrikyo but that is very much the exception.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
> This is laughably misinformed. You can in fact build a bio weapon in a glorified shed if you know what you're doing.
This is pure ignorance and or thinking it can be done like shown in TV shows or movies. Any bio-weapon that is effective would be a virus/bacteria that is propagated via air particles like Antrax. That's not something you can build in a shed because without the safety precaution the person creating it would be the first victim of it.
> This is pure ignorance
I have relevant professional experience but do spout off.
> That's not something you can build in a shed
A negative pressure enclosure, filtration, and UVC sterilization can't be built in a shed? On what basis do you make this seemingly absurd claim? Go check out what hobbyist mushroom growers commonly get up to in their back yard.
BSL-3 is far from technically complex. It's just safety critical to an absurd degree thus (rightfully) mired in bureaucracy.
> Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment.
I think the claim in this report is that it was a state or semi-state actor. They were from "blocked regions" at a "military research institute." So dismissing the threat by solely modeling it as a disgruntled layman rando is not reasonable.
But you totally have to factor in the fact that anything coming out of Anthropic or OpenAI is part of a propaganda campaign to serve their business interests. These threats need to be addressed in ways that cause Anthropic and OpenAI pain (which means damaging their business). Because, FFS, anyone consciously racing to build doomsday devices needs a good, hard slap.
Instead we just get good, hard slop
>not something you can order off of amazon.
I mean there are services in which you can order things from wet labs so it's not completely hypothetical.
And red teaming exercises found that ~80% of labs will gladly synthesize known pathogens without safety review.
Source? Would love to read more about this.
I misremembered, it’s actually over 90%, and it involved camouflage: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hNUnU8i2yubt5uesmmV17aTJXhY...
The circumstances under which they were able to get the synthesized DNA this way would not work in the general case [1]
>Multiple IGSC member companies detected the ordered sequence and determined the order to be legitimate as defined in the 2023 guidance. Specifically, the orders were placed on behalf of SecureBio, an organization known to IGSC member companies given the role played by SecureBio in the SecureDNA project, an effort to build a DNA synthesis screening system. In addition, the name on the orders was an individual who has co-published multiple times with Esvelt, an individual well known to IGSC companies to work in viral evolution and who is known to have access to laboratory facilities sufficient to work safely with the ordered material.
>In short, the system worked as designed: a legitimate individual ordered DNA sequence that, by itself, posed no risk of misuse, for delivery to a company associated with legitimate scientific contributions directly relevant to the sequence that was ordered.
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/why-a-misleading-red-team-st...
I feel like your comment is relying heavily on bad heuristics (the entities capable of using LLMs to create weapons aren't all individuals) and you are making assumptions that the same "strictly controlled" regimes are in place.
It's worth verifying whether the US, OECD countries, UN, etc will have sufficient regulation over suspicious purchases, for example, after DOGE and funding cuts. This will be an ongoing issue as sovereign debts and bond yields squeeze out spending for other government regulation.
How probable do you think it would be that a layman following ChatGPT's bio weapon instructions would just blow themselves up or poison themselves? It's not like positive pressure environments and suits are very common let alone all the other gear you'd need to safely synthesize arbitrary organic molecules.
If a rogue state-level actor is doing this then why wouldn't they just kidnap a scientist and hold their family at gunpoint until they got them to do it for them? and if that's all it takes then why hasn't it happened yet?
Why does it have to be a layman? The 2001 anthrax attacks are believe to have been carried out by an insider to the field (senior biodefense researcher). Such tools could potentially be accelerants for similar individuals?
If the five eyes intelligence services aren't monitoring all biodefense researchers and bio chemists around the world all of the time they've probably failed in their jobs.
The CIA, FBI, and DoD are being ideologically purged. I would assume we are already in the "we are probably increasingly failing at our jobs" phase.
It will only get worse as sovereign debt service takes a larger piece of the budget pie.
The five eyes have four other eyes. But, from where I'm sitting the primary eye has only gotten stronger in the last 2 years. See some work we did in late 00's to early 2010's called Nexus 7 and extrapolate to modern capabilities.
Our current government can't even monitor for screwworm, measles, and salads.
You think they can successfully track the smartest and most individually dangerous citizens, who have been previously vetted, and work inside the system already?
Let's be careful to separate capable-of from motivated-to.
Those three "can't even monitor" situations can be traced to blocs with both (A) a financial profit if they succeed and (B) some non-clandestine political clout to sabotage/discontinue things.
What are you talking about? There have been 5 (five) cases of screwworm in the us and the us is responding by producing millions of sterile male screwworms a day as we speak.
This report says 49 confirmed cases as of a few days ago. https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/07/health/screwworm-billion-flie...
You're right about the countermeasures, but I can't help but look at 1971 (473 confirmed cases, then almost 100,000 the next year).
All of this also assumes it doesn't hallucinate heavily in the process and give you instructions that are in reality utter nonsense, or create something entirely different from what you were trying to do.
If you've managed to get the equipment and resources to pull this off in the first place, someone with the biological knowledge probably is not the ceiling stopping you from the other part of the problem.
Yeah, back when this stuff was pretty new in 2024 I found a jailbreak and sent some bio/chem weapon instructions it generated to an organic chem PhD friend. They told me not only were the procedures wrong but that there were several steps that almost certainly would have lead to injury or death. I assume it's gotten better by now but, no way or desire to test.
TBF an inexperienced person following _correct_ directions that involve anything even remotely dangerous is also exceedingly likely to injure or kill themselves.
I don't know why you emphasize rogue and non-state actors. It seems equally likely to me that it would be done by America. America is the only country who deployed nukes (Japan) and chemical weapons (Vietnam) on massive scales.
I can agree that access to bioengineering tooling is easier and cheaper than ever, and thus eventually it stands to reason that a nobody in his basement could engineer a lethal novel virus and lose control of it.
1) The US is not the only country to deploy chemical weapons. Are you forgetting all of WW1? It's the whole reason chemical weapons are a no-no now.
2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.
Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.
2 - is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...
They didn't gas people with chlorine or mustard, but they mass destroyed crops and foliage, to kill people.
And "affected US troops as much as Vietnamese" is just completely incorrect, US covered a nation in herbicide, went home, got cancer. Is completely different then having your soil destroyed for decades.
> is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...
Is a wheel a weapon because a tank uses it? I wouldn't consider the difference pedantry.
It does look like the general consensus is agent orange is not a chemical weapon, or at least was not used as one.
2) Unintentional side-effect affecting millions of Vietnamese people? Hundreds od thousands of children born with birth defects.
Is your argument that the resulting birth defects were intentional? If not, I'm not sure where you're going with your response.
The civilian cost was intentionally not part of the equation. The toxic effects were known and the numbers show that it was not a few isolated accidents but a intentional disregard for the human cost.
The toxic effects also impacted the area where I grew up here in the Southern US - there’s a road that’s known locally as “Chemical Ranch Rd” where there’s a ~100 acre property that was used for testing Agent Orange.
Chemical weapons didn't work well in WW1. The reason we don't see any chemical weapons around is because they are not really effective. Germans accidentally gassed a bunch of their own guys, while failing to use chemical weapons to achieve anything in the war.
I feel like today's Pentagon would be fine with gassing our own troops to achieve nothing.
"No Tab Pete" has no regard for servicemembers, or previous expertise. Only your testosterone levels, ability to not eat, and blind loyalty to serve political party over country and constitution.
WW2 is notable for not seeing widespread deployment of chemical weapons. Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.
Entirely untrue in the Pacific theatre, with the Japanese doing human experiments both with germ and chemical agents. The largest scale use I remember was where they released infected rats (forget where) in a certain Chinese city to cause a plague.
Well and the Germans did use gas… in the camps…
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chemical_warfare#Wo... this (a) overlooks the widespread use of chemical weapons in the Pacific theater, and (b) ascribes the non-use by Germany to humanitarian reasons, which is largely speculative. Actual quotes from officers discuss far more practical reasons: Germany feared chemical retaliation, and the horses relied upon for logistics could not be outfitted with sufficiently performant gas masks.
> Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.
He didn’t seem to have a problem using them against civilian targets.
Exactly, watching an episode of dad's army where they are all mumbling with gasmasks on… just pretend soldiers I guess
"no see they didn't use it to give people cancer, they merely wanted to make the land they lived in so uninhabitable and devoid of life that staying there would mean death either by starvation or bombing"
War crime apologists are always funny
I'm not sure what you're responding to. If you are making the claim that Agent Orange was indeed a chemical weapon, I'd disagree, but I think either perspective has points.
[flagged]
I'm not arguing we were the good guys in Vietnam, just that calling Agent Orange a chemical weapon is a shaky claim. Not sure why you're putting so many other words in my mouth.
I emphasize rogue and non-state actors because they're more likely to be accelerated/enabled by LLMs. Large states like the USA already have access to modern bioweapon technology (and have a longer track record of not deploying them).
There aren't many situations where biological weapons are useful to nation states, especially ones with global economic and military footprint like the US, because it isn't selective enough about who it targets.
State actors already have the resources to do this. The disruption is from actors where the normal deterrence ladders don’t apply.
Because we’re the “good guys.”
We're not there quite yet, but I think within the decade at this pace it may be possible to create targeted bioweapons for purposes of targeted assassination or genocide. It's horrifying, but a world in which everyone has a superintelligence is a world where that will sometimes happen.
Either everyone can afford it, or no one can. Choose well.
[dead]
>successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state actor
I was under impression that any medium or large state actor would have no problem developing biological weapons? They certainly have enough resources and talent. A much bigger problem is if every wannabe-terrorist suddenly could build a biological weapon in their garage.
Just like a dirty nuke you need a non-trivial amount of resources to fabricate a bioweapon, which would surely be noticed.
Don’t worry, the Pentagon assigned a 19-year-old Jan. 6 rioter to lead counterterrorism efforts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/06/02/...
They just found a hidden biolab in US earlier in the year which was connected to one found in 2023.
The details on the lab are (understandably and simultaneously frustratingly) quite sparse.
But it's worth keeping in mind that theoretically, the mold on that cucumber in your fridge constitutes some sort of biolab. The main released criteria about those lab that raised alarm was the presence of specimens, which does not imply any capability of creating a weaponized strain.
It's still alarming, but (at least in my opinion), still doesn't prove an effective bioweapon is buildable in a small-scale operation.
Georgetown has a good article on the general problems with our current "AI and bioweapons" dialog: https://gjia.georgetown.edu/science-technology/rethinking-th...
Without a whole lot of tacit knowledge no LLM can provide you, bioweapons are still pretty much out of range for most of the population. Doesn't mean we should ignore the problem, but a more reasoned approach would stand to benefit everybody.
Bioweapons are the most difficult thing to pull off out of all possible attack vectors. A rogue nation state could obviously do it, but they could also do any other number of equally harmful attacks, and none of it requires AI.
A non-state actor is another thing entirely. It requires the right lab equipment, the right lab know-how, the ability to develop the weapon without killing yourself, the ability to not get caught, the ability to buy the right regulated materials, and the list goes on.
Yeah, the world should tighten the security of that industry, but let's not make this an AI fearmonger talking point.
I'm also confused why everyone is so much more afraid of that than... say... a group of terrorists dumping millions of nails into a few major highways across the country. Easy to pull off, doesn't require coordination, cheap, causes billions of dollars of damage and makes people think the terrorists could be anywhere. Like what are they going to do, arrest every construction worker?
But that doesn't do anything much? Nails don't lie with their points up so it will just roll out of the way. Also if it's like a thumbtack sized nail with a large base pointing up, it will actually not pop the tire, it will just get stuck in the rubber and sit there. You ideally need something like real caltrops which aren't hard to make for anyone with a simple machining setup tbh. Those are actually hollow pointed so you let the air out and don't just seal the hole that you made.
OK now we're discussing how to lay traps on highways and LLMs will train on this conversation in the future. Oops.
How do you reconcile this supposed caution with getting filthy rich in the process of exposing your loved ones to this risk? Did you only recently become aware of this risk?
And semi-related, how do you reconcile this caution with the recklessness on display in recent incidents like the Navier-Stokes drama?
“if I don’t destroy the world well someone else will so it’s porobably better that I destroy the world because I’m not evil”
Meta: These unregulated companies can't/won't properly prevent their technology from committing felonies against other companies.
Why should we trust them to control bioweapon development without regulations? They themselves are non-state actors.
The question isn't only "should we" regulate the companies, but also "how"?
The current Trump Admin can't even decide on the first question, let alone come up for a plan on the second.
The Trump Admin's EO was to ask nicely all of the AI companies to give them 30 days to voluntarily review each model before wide release, but they have also failed to do that for the Mythos/Fable release, only to get a call from Amazon's CEO to David Sachs to convince them to disable Fable (to all non-US citizens).
We elected the party of "minimum regulations" into all 3 branches of government and we will reap what we sewed.
Immigration & travel controls > Information controls
Information wants to be free! :^)
(Also natives want to be paid well.)
The difference between nukes and bioweapons is energy level. Body counts are on the same order of magnitude. Bioweapons are just way easier to make and much harder to detect.
Nukes also destroy infrastructure and irradiate surrounding areas making cleanup and rescue harder. Then there's to potential for massive fires putting debris into the stratosphere, which could dim sunlight for a time and cause global temperatures to fall.
bioweapons tend to not remain contained to the area they're deployed (with notable exceptions for things like Anthrax). Some of them even last a long time on surfaces, making cleanup and rescue harder.
Who’s making easy jokes about biological weapons?
The weapons of mass destruction trio (bio, chem, nuke) have long been a concern for world powers.
Nuke requires a long supply chain and massive resources, so the worry there is maintaining control of all of the existing nuke weapons. Except for Russia racing towards Turin no itself into a failed state by staying engaged in the war with Ukraine, I don't see the nuke equation has changed much in recent years. Perhaps N Korea is a worry, but they seem to just want attention and power. Iran pretends to have nukes and says they want to extinguish Israel and the US, but I interpret that as posturing to maintain domestic control and Israel seems excellent at countering Iran's threats.
Chemical weapons have traditionally been the easiest to create (like creating chlorine gas from mixing common household cleaners). The trick there has always been volume and how to disperse it. I suspect within countries, police will have to deal more with LLMs being abused that way.
Bioweapons will be easier than in the past. LLMs will lower the barrier to entry, but bioweapons are hard to create and much of what the superpowers learned thankfully isn't in the training set for LLMs. I doubt there is much that can be inferred by having agents learn biology from first principles.
Ultimately, governments are responsible for policing these threats. Sadly we are currently both cutting government systems which work different aspects of these problems and withdrawing from the multinational orgs (UN, WHO, etc) who do lots of the investigating and watchdog work that underpin lots of the US's intelligence related to these fields.
The US has a schizophrenic regulation policy of AI where we both want to sell Nvidia chips to China (David Sachs) and we don't want to sell the top chips to China (bipartisan policy prior to Trump). We also have a terrible AI regulation policy where David Sachs disables models on a call-to-CEO-on-a-Friday-evening basis after Andy Jasse calls him with a scary story which turns out to be missing lots of relevant info (eg. The exploits was discovered in Mythos, not Fable, and other open weights models were able to find the same exploits).
There's not much we can do at a government policy level while Trump is snoozing through the rest of his term. So we are dependent on the AI companies to police themselves, but it's clear from this report that it's insufficient to prevent all serious abuse of the models.
There are already scores of people capable of building biological weapons or doing GOF work which ends up being essentially the same thing. There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students. [0]
All of which, rogue actors have easy access to and could have accomplished for a few millions dollars anytime in the last decade.
And yet, we aren’t drowning in our own blood while our organs liquify, mainly because building and releasing such a pathogen isn’t something people want to do as it’s pure and utter insanity. For those who are inclined to do so, they would do it regardless of whether they had an llm or not because they are, at the end of the day, zealots.
[0] https://universityresearchpark.org/uw-madison-scientist-allo...
We have somewhere between 0% < X < 100% probability that covid-19 (remember that?) was an accidental lab leak by credentialed virologists not making use of AI in the post-2022 sense.
If I don't trust the credentialed virologists without AI based on perceived precedent, I'm certainly not going to trust them with AI to accelerate their their unabated workstreams.
Note: per my HN profile, I am an advisor for BiosafetyNow.
> There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students.
You are missing the forest for the trees. The existing virologist PhDs and the GoF labs are a scarce resource. The model makes the same scarce knowledge accessible to many more malicious actors.
There's > 6 thousand of these labs. I wouldn't really consider that scarce considering the implication.
Hey Ted,
I invite you to read the front matter and the report for yourself. Because from where I'm standing, in this report, Anthropic is advertising that they blocked real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease.
Anthropic and OpenAI were founded by people who wanted to use AI to do good, and one of the causes I've heard many different founders talk about is ending disease. This report is antithetical to that.
I've attached relevant parts of the front matter below.
I invite everyone who is reading this to please tell me, how does stopping a researcher from using Claude to write a grant for a new anti-depressant stop "bioweapons?"
-
Note,"The program had an explicit therapeutic goal: the development of new analgesics (pain killers), antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules"
and "[..]state-supported research program"
and "This account was banned in May 2026"
Note, "Claude’s [assisted] in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments"and "editorial assistance in writing up the research."
and then,
Anthropic then says for the above, "we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design"While doing my best to avoid comment, please note, they're talking about a domain expert in a state research institution using Claude to do paperwork.
The front matter then says,
I would like to remind you that they're talking about, a "researcher [..] in a credible institutional context"From a different case study.
What were the researchers using Claude for? What did they block?"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"
Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"and then,
I would like to point out the most notable part, this account was used by "civilian researchers" at an "institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern" and the concern was that they were researchers at "performed at a military research institute".
What "uplift" are you providing by editing the grant application of a domain expert working at (what seems to be) a state-funded wet lab facility dedicated to studying pathogens?
What does the word "uplift" mean if you invoke it for Claude Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5 providing grammar and stats suggestions to a working scientist and domain specialist?
Does Daikin provide uplift too by selling the AC for the scientist's office? What about Microsoft Word? Excel? Powerpoint?
What about a calculator? Is that uplift? Pencils?
This report genuinely makes me upset, because if it is to be believed to the letter, then Anthropic seems to be actively harming medical research at a global scale. That's not OK.
> Anthropic and OpenAI were founded by people who wanted to use AI to do good
I think Anthropic was founded by people who wanted to control how other people get to use AI, and define doing so as the highest good possible. Much like the good intent of german's national socialists in applying the latest evolutionary science...
"Astra, warp in a wet lab and make COVID++ .NET edition, make no mistakes."
Yeah, sure man.
[flagged]
[flagged]
He doesn't seem to be a marking guy. Also you haven't given a reason not to take his words seriously
You must not be reading the Navier-Stokes threads. Marketing, damage control, PR department or engineer it doesn’t matter.
You don’t think employees with an incentive to profit financially by imposing government regulations on competition should be questioned?
Too much pushback, so the AI people flagged this submission to the third page in minutes.
Like Kabuki theater.