AI Leaders Warn Advanced Models Could Enable Deadly Pathogens

Advanced AI is moving deeper into biology and genetic design, offering faster drug and vaccine development while potentially lowering the expertise needed to create toxins, pathogens or biological weapons. That dual-use risk has become a central concern for frontier-model developers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The policy challenge is to preserve legitimate scientific gains while preventing malicious users from exploiting models, genomic data and increasingly accessible gene-synthesis services.

Axios reported on July 24 that a MIT FutureTech and University of Queensland survey asked 272 researchers to rank 24 AI risks. Respondents put a 12% probability on dangerous AI capabilities causing catastrophe by 2030 and another 12% on AI-enabled weapons and mass harm; without mitigation, each estimate exceeded 20%. The study defined catastrophe as more than 1 million deaths or $100 billion in damage. In June, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman and Meta’s Alexandr Wang signed a letter urging Congress to mandate customer and order screening by synthetic DNA and RNA providers.