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AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

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Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#61

Post by ben_w »

wat10000 wrote: post #41
consensus1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the easiest and most effective AI regulations would be to simply require all these labs to run all incoming requests through a suite of the most advanced models asking if the request is likely to be a pathogenic agent.

Who’s going to simply require that? There are ~200 sovereign nations on the planet, they’re not all going to do it, or have effective enforcement if they do.

This is the kind of thing that would be relatively easy to convince nations to sign up to*; actually enforcing, I suspect you're right.

* there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#62

Post by timr »

estearum wrote: post #48
timr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you literally cannot. Synthesizing a stretch of DNA is trivial, and what you can send away for [1]. Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial. [1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two c…

https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo... There you go! Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.

Yes, that's one of the ones I was talking about.

That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#63

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

hoppp wrote: post #19

The regulation at the DNA Printer level works I think, as long as nobody invents a good at home DNA printer, but if they do that there is no need for custom viruses, somebody can take an existing one that is known to be deadly and just print it.

A custom designed virus is potentially far more deadly than something like ebola, because animals/plants will have zero resistance to it.

It'd be like releasing an invasive species into an ecosystem that has not co-evolved to co-exist with it.

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#64

Post by nozzlegear »

colingauvin wrote: post #2

No, a human could do (and have, many many many times, see like half of molecular biology) this as well. If anything this will help with vaccine development. Edit: I'm a PhD biochemist that has done a fair bit of virus modification. Love the downvotes. Never change HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree with you. I favor the view that humans are generally morally good when taken on the whole. There already exists the technology for ne'er-do-wells to engineer viruses and unleash them on the world. But I submit that A) there aren't many people who want to do that in the first place; and B) there's a vanishingly small amount of people who want to work with those people to help them achieve it.

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#65

Post by sscaryterry »

morkalork wrote: post #51
estearum wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is DNA synthesis is now like a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad tier challenge and doesn't even require much specialized equipment. Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.

I want to say I've already read some articles about hobbyists buying previous generation equipment from labs. The entire supplychain would need to be locked down with used equipment being returned to manufacturers for there to be any security.

I saw a sweet electron microscope on eBay, for 2000 quid. If I had the space...

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#66

Post by Enginerrrd »

estearum wrote: post #25
demibabs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they not be like “hmmm this one looks kinda similar to a known virus” They really just synthesize anything for you?

I'm sure some of them would, but they're not required by law to do so. And historically the way you'd do this is by actual fragment/substring matches. But these are novel viruses now. So what you really want to do is try to predict whether a novel genome is pathogenic... which is itself obviously a very hard technical problem.

That’s not too much a concern I think. Most of the real pathogenic qualities result from known genes. Inventing a totally novel virus that is also pathogenic is basically science fiction right now. Splicing together known components that could be bad in combination is closer to current technology.

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#67

Post by timr »

haxiomic wrote: post #10
timr wrote: post #4

The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing. Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.

There’s YouTubers who do this [0]. I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high - [0] https://youtu.be/aoczYXJeMY4?is=OqObeGzZB6AKL0Jk

Not even close to the same thing. That's taking an existing viral transfection system and swapping in a single gene.

Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this [1]. It's something you might do a few thousand times on the way to actually generating a novel virus.

> I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high

I'd argue that it probably already happened, and had nothing to do with AI.

[1] AAV transfection.

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#68

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

estearum wrote: post #32
falcor84 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, why are you not worried?

It's super cringe and d e c e l to think technological advancement could have any dangers whatsoever. Just like in a car, the true demonstration of intelligence is closing your eyes and slamming the pedal to the floor.

You are describing some people driving with FSD today. I bet hundreds or maybe thousands of people a day try letting it drive for a while without paying any attention. The car watches your eyes to be sure you don't do this, but people try to defeat that too. Sunglasses make it hard to tell what's going on.

I see it's still happening as of July 2026 -

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319863/20260707/sunglasse...

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/zt1kgt/anyone_...

But even though there are a few people tricking the "are you paying attention" check, probably more people complain about it being too careful and overbearing.

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#69

Post by estearum »

timr wrote: post #59
rbliss wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet.

No, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer. The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master. So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good…

Your example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?

Re: AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

#70

Post by smallmancontrov »

estearum wrote: post #53
smallmancontrov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part where that service doesn't exist and isn't close to existing.

https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo... Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist. And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens? Answers: No, no, and no.

Really? mRNA? What kind of meme nonsense is this? You really don't know anything about these protocols do you.

Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.

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