Bridging the Digital to Physical Divide

Evaluating LLM Agents on Benchtop DNA Acquisition

Kyle Brady, Jeffrey Lee, Dawid Maciorowski, Alyssa Worland, Jordan Despanie, Bria Persaud, Barbara Del Castello, Henry Alexander Bradley, Grant Ellison, Charles Teague, et al.

ResearchPublished Feb 3, 2026

This report describes eight frontier large language model (LLM) agents on their ability to design DNA segments, interact with a benchtop DNA synthesizer, and generate laboratory protocols. These are dual-use tasks, explored as potential technical bottlenecks to a malicious actor building a viral pathogen that could be weaponized. Performance varied among the models, but all tested LLMs designed biologically coherent DNA segments in some attempts.

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Brady, Kyle, Jeffrey Lee, Dawid Maciorowski, Alyssa Worland, Jordan Despanie, Bria Persaud, Barbara Del Castello, Henry Alexander Bradley, Grant Ellison, Charles Teague, Sarah L. Gebauer, Greg McKelvey, Jr., Steph Guerra, and Ella Guest, Bridging the Digital to Physical Divide: Evaluating LLM Agents on Benchtop DNA Acquisition. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4591-1.html.
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This research was independently initiated and conducted by the Center on AI, Security, and Technology within RAND Global and Emerging Risks.

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