The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the life sciences could yield beneficial scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, this convergence creates new opportunities for AI-enabled biology to be misused.
To address this challenge, Helena and the RAND Center on AI, Security, and Technology convened the From Risk to Resilience: An AI x Bio Mitigations Workshop. The first workshop was held in January 2026. The second workshop, held on May 7, 2026, in Washington, D.C., brought together 15 individuals with expertise in biosecurity policy, health security policy, AI policy, national security policy, and foreign policy. RAND and Helena convened these experts to assess the results of the first workshop: mitigations to combat AI-enabled biological threats.
The second workshop’s purpose was for participants to translate those mitigations into robust, practical, and policy-focused implementation plans. Doing so included identifying metrics for success, necessary resources, critical stakeholders, key outcomes, enablers and dependencies, and potential implementation challenges required to move each mitigation from a conceptual technical intervention to an actionable strategy that relevant stakeholders could pursue.
The authors share the results of the second workshop in these conference proceedings. In this publication, the authors identify actionable paths forward and what would be required to move each mitigation from theory to reality. They highlight the potential policy levers and operational steps for mitigation implementation plans, as well as the dependencies, trade-offs, and coordination challenges that would need to be addressed for each mitigation to succeed.
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