A research paper published in the journal Science has warned about the biosecurity risks posed by artificial intelligence models in biology.
‘AI and biosecurity: The need for governance’ argues for improved governance and pre-release safety evaluations of new models in order to mitigate potential threats.
Advances in biological AI models hold great promise across many applications, from speeding up drug and vaccine design to improving crop yields and resilience. However, alongside these benefits, biological AI models also pose serious risks. Because of their general-purpose nature, the same model that designs a harmless viral vector for gene therapy could be used to create a more dangerous, novel viral pathogen that evades vaccines. Although developers of these systems have made voluntary commitments to evaluate the dual-use risks of these models the paper highlights how these measures are insufficient to ensure safety on their own.
According to the authors, there is a notable lack of governance to address risks, including standardized, mandatory safety evaluations for advanced biological AI models. Although some policy measures exist, such as the White House Executive Order on AI, and the Bletchley Declaration signed at the UK AI Safety Summit in 2023, there is no unified approach to evaluating the safety of these powerful tools before they are released.
