AI is accelerating advances in biotechnology, but it could also help bad actors cause the next medical crisis.
Artificial intelligence has made information much more accessible to the public. However, this change is causing concern among AI leaders and experts. In an open letter to the U.S. Congress, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman, and more than 50 signatories called for safeguards in the handling of synthetic DNA and RNA, which are essential components in the development of vaccines and other biotech innovations.
Signatories include scientists, national security experts, and executives from gene synthesis companies.
“AI systems are rapidly advancing, offering incredible benefits to science and medicine, and there is a real possibility that they could meaningfully erode the knowledge barriers that have historically prevented bad actors from acquiring biological weapons,” the letter said. said.
Experts said the ability to order synthetic DNA online has accelerated vaccine development, but there is a blind spot that could theoretically allow a malicious party to order DNA sequences and reconstruct a dangerous virus.
Synthetic companies have been conducting voluntary testing since 2009, but it is not universal.
“We call on legislators to mandate screening of synthetic nucleic acid orders and the equipment needed to do so,” it added.
The letter comes shortly after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a voluntary framework requiring AI developers to share their advanced models with the government before making them public.
AI for biological research and development
According to Markets and Markets, the global value of AI in biotechnology was valued at $3.51 billion in 2024, $4.16 billion in 2025, and is expected to reach $22.72 billion by 2035.
In a milestone, Demis Hassabis from Google’s DeepMind AI Lab has been jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work using AI to predict protein structures and accelerate drug discovery.
“(A.I. I feel like individual scientists can do more because these systems are good at analyzing data and identifying patterns and structures, but they can’t figure out what the right questions, hypotheses, or inferences are. Everything has to come from human scientists. I think the best scientists combined with these kinds of tools will be able to rely on the tools to do a lot of things, so even smaller teams will probably be able to do incredible things than before,” he said. said In December 2024.
May, OpenAI announced Rosalind Biodefense is a new initiative aimed at accelerating the development of high-impact defensive applications of AI in life sciences through GPT-Rosalind, a frontier inference model built for life sciences research.
