The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology offers great promise for medicine and public health, including the potential to yield transformative societal benefits. Yet this same convergence could introduce serious global health and national security risks. As capabilities continue to advance, AI-enabled biotechnology might lower the technical, operational, and motivational barriers to creating biological weapons. It might also enable high-consequence attacks involving enhanced or novel pathogens. The dual-use nature of biotechnology requires proactive mitigation measures to counter these threats.
In this report, the authors develop a defense-in-depth mitigation strategy that is robust, complementary, and deployable across a wide variety of threat scenarios. To create the strategy, the authors assessed the capabilities of various actor types across different steps of the bioweapon-development pathway prior to an attack, from ideation to weaponization. They also examined how different mitigations could add friction to primary milestones that nefarious actors must bypass to successfully execute an attack using AI-enabled biological weapons.
The authors describe a network of nine mitigations, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and areas of mutual reinforcement, and propose next steps for how decisionmakers in the public and private sectors can work collaboratively to advance this strategy.
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