AI Could Supercharge Biological Weapons ‘Ten Times’ Scale Of COVID, Report Warns

Artificial intelligence could possibly help design biological events far deadlier than COVID, according to a new report.

RAND published a report Tuesday that discussed several mitigating strategies for restricting bad actors from misusing AI technology to create biological weapons. This comes as Anthropic’s Claude built proteins that locked onto 14 of 15 targets in a lab setting, according to the company’s Tuesday announcement.

AI leaders at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic previously urged Congress to pass a law requiring DNA and RNA sellers to screen buyers and keep proper records of their orders in June, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“AI-enabled biotechnology might lower the technical, operational, and motivational barriers to creating biological weapons,” the report warned. “It might also enable devastating attacks involving enhanced or novel pathogens, including events far worse than historical pandemics that caused many millions of fatalities globally.”

The report mentioned plans for disasters exponentially worse than COVID-19.

“[This report] focuses on high-consequence AI-enabled biological incidents, which we define as biological events capable of producing impacts on the order of ten times the scale of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic or greater, societal disruption, or systemic destabilization,” the Purpose section of the report read in part.

RAND and Anthropic each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Anthropic acknowledged the dangers of this research and is restricting these AI capabilities from public access.

“Without robust safety measures, they could enable bad actors to perform dangerous research, such as the development of bioweapons,” the company said in its Tuesday announcement post. “As we work to deliver these capabilities safely via trusted access programs, protein design and other dual-use research biology capabilities remain unavailable for general access in Claude Fable 5.”

“No single safeguard can prevent a bad actor from using AI to help build a biological weapon,” RAND wrote in a Wednesday X post. “But our new report identifies nine interventions that, layered together, could meaningfully lower the risk of a significant AI-enabled attack.”

RAND lead author Steph Guerra believes the “most dangerous thresholds have not yet been crossed,” she told Axios. Still, Guerra argued that this unregulated technology is a threat and requires “mutually reinforcing approaches.”