AI Could Pose Pandemic-Scale Biosecurity Risks

Since July, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have been assessing how the artificial intelligence (AI) model GPT-4o can assist humans with tasks in biological research. In the evaluations — which are being conducted to advance innovations in the biosciences, as well as to understand potential risks — humans ask GPT-4o various questions to help them achieve standard experimental tasks. These include maintaining and propagating cells in vitro; separating cells and other components in a sample using a centrifuge; and introducing foreign genetic material into a host organism.

In these assessments, researchers at Los Alamos are collaborating with OpenAI, the company in San Francisco, California, that developed GPT-4o. The tests are among a handful of efforts aiming to address potential biosafety and biosecurity issues posed by AI models since OpenAI made ChatGPT, a chatbot based on large language models (LLMs), publicly available in November 2022.

We argue that much more is needed.

Three of us investigate how scientific and technological innovations can affect public health and health security at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland. Two of us research and develop solutions to public-policy challenges at the non-profit think tank RAND, which is headquartered in Santa Monica, California.

Although we see the promise of AI-assisted biological research to improve human health and well-being, this technology is still unpredictable and presents potentially significant risks. We urge governments to move faster to clarify which risks warrant most attention, and to determine what adequate testing and mitigation measures for these potential risks should entail. In short, we call for a more deliberate approach that draws on decades of government and scientific experience in reducing pandemic-scale risks in biological research.