This article is republished from National Review.

Media outlets are reporting that Stanford scientists used AI to create an artificial virus. From the Wall Street Journal story:

Artificial-intelligence systems have been displaying some eye-opening new abilities in recent weeks: breaking out of their enclosures, hacking other companies, lying to people.

And now, for the first time, an AI model has created a new virus. A whole family of them, in fact.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere said they successfully directed an AI model to create a collection of simple viruses that only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.

These particular viruses may not be dangerous, but what about the next ones scientists manufacture? What about potential attempts to test their virulence in humans? The approach in the Stanford lab sure sounds like a new form of gain-of-function research to me.

Pros and cons

Image Credit: peterschreiber.media - Adobe Stock

There is no question that a lot of good can come from this research:

In an interview, two of the authors said their research could help develop designer viruses that could be used to eliminate drug-resistant bacteria, which according to the World Health Organization kill millions of people every year.

“If we develop responsibly, I think it can lead to tremendous benefits in human health,” said Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford and an author of the study.

But there are also pronounced dangers:

The potential use of chatbots or agents to develop deadly pathogens has long been a concern among AI safety experts. Last year, after the release of an upgraded version of ChatGPT, hundreds of people queried the chatbot to ask it how to produce biological weapons and poisons, and it responded by providing instructions that biology and terrorism experts judged as accurate, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Experts said the Stanford team’s research doesn’t pose an immediate security risk. It isn’t likely to be applied immediately to viruses that infect humans. Those viruses are much larger and more complex than the ones synthesized in the experiment.

“When people hear that a virus was generated by AI, a lot of people are going to be terrified,” said Peter Koo, a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “But human viruses are so different.”

Again, AI is not the real story here. That’s a deflection. Chatbots were the tools used, but humans were the creative driving force. And we, not our tools, bear responsibility for outcomes.

Where’s the political leadership?

It seems to me that turning the story into one about AI also misses an important point. Scientists are developing the most powerful technologies in history. But we seem to lack the wisdom to do this responsibly. Indeed, it appears that very little is being done to ensure that AI, biotech, and every other kind of cutting-edge tech are not abused or used for malign purposes.

Frankly, this policy lethargy represents a failure of political leadership. When is President Trump going to finally focus on this? Uniquely in the world, Trump has the visibility to bring these issues to the fore of international attention and begin important conversations about putting hard safety and moral boundaries around emerging technologies, while not choking them in the crib. There is so much at stake here — far more than tariffs, new monuments in Washington, and even Iran. Perhaps he recalls the negative media reaction to President George W. Bush’s minor funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. But that’s no excuse. Trump’s (and many other world leaders’) failure to grapple urgently with tech’s acute challenge to the human future reminds— me ominously of the blithe assurance of the builders of the Titanic that their ship could never sink. Pride may goeth before the fall, but so does complacency.