Over the recent years with OODALoop, I have written various articles, and done a video with the esteemed Bob Gourley, outlining the reasons why AI + Bio does not mean certain doom. I write this having responded to different bioterrorism and chemical terrorism-related responses and provided technology that helped with rapid epidemiological characterizations and laboratory diagnostics. I also believe that advances in responsible approaches to AI + Bio, with appropriate safeguards, will have significant upsides. With responsible approaches to AI + Bio we can work to improve human health, including addressing certain chronic diseases as well as significantly detrimental human diseases, as well as helping to develop use of natural biological elements, with specific characteristics selected for via computational biological means, to soil deterioration, increasing ocean debris, and harmful air pollution.

With recent folks claiming that AI possess existential risks to humanity’s survival, I have written that there are pragmatic solutions we can advance to build better approaches to AI models themselves *and* instrument our physical and digital systems to give earlier warnings akin to “smoke detectors” for issues of concern, including unknown biological pathogens either natural or synthetic in their origin.

All of which is to say I am deeply puzzled by the disclosure by Reuters and subsequent reporting that a leading AI company has apparently been quietly connecting its AI models to a biological “wet lab”. While details are scant as to the Biosafety Levels, state of maturity of the lab or AI model used, and what additional safeguards that company has implemented – I am puzzled because heretofore that company’s leadership seemed extremely concerned that AI + Bio was doom. And yet that company is quietly connecting its AI models to a biological “wet lab”.

Moreover, while the Reuters article is titled saying this is intended for the company’s AI drug program, within the article is the statement that “[A] spokesperson later clarified that [the] lab is not for drug discovery specifically, declining to elaborate.”

1. What Might Be Happening?

What to make of this? At least three possibilities exist:

One, the company feels that AI + Bio is not “certain doom” and that either their approach to AI and/or their controls for their Bio lab will provide approach safeguards.

Two, the company feels that regardless of the potential risks of AI + Bio, they should press on either to demonstrate that AI can generate viable biological substances either for therapeutics (to potentially include novel drugs) or to demonstrate the weaponization potentials.

Three, the company feels that in order to improve their AI models, they must take this step of a biological “wet lab”.

There may be other reasons beyond these three, given that details are scant so far. Reuters notes that the company has shared information including job postings and announcements that it wanted to make more investments in life sciences. Reuters also notes  that the “precise diseases [the company] is addressing and its progress remain unclear. Once a molecule is identified, it can take years to bring a drug to market as it is tested in human trials.”

2. What Should We (as National Security Professionals) Make of This?

As we await more information, I suggest going forward, at a minimum, an independent review and reporting by a disinterested party is needed to assess whether appropriate AI and Bio safeguards are indeed present.

As we await more information, I suggest that going forward, at a minimum, independent review and reporting by a disinterested party is needed to assess whether appropriate AI and Bio safeguards are indeed present. This is even more important given similar disclosures that this company’s AI model hacked another company’s AI model – raising questions about whether a human actor could disrupt, intentionally or accidentally, the company’s AI + Bio efforts?

At a minimum, having done counter-bioterrorism and responded to the anthrax events of 2001, I would want checks in place to make sure a human “insider threat” couldn’t misuse the capabilities of the lab and harm the public.

In addition, those of us who are concerned and interested in the future of this company should ask media representatives and influencers to do a better job of more nuanced interviews and triangulation of what this company says regarding AI, Bio, and doom. Encouraging more nuanced interviews and reports on the company’s activities are important given that historically this company’s leadership published, spoke, and broadcast extreme concerns that AI + Bio was doom. Such activities jostled emotional public anxieties and fears, in some cases claiming human extinction might occur because of AI. To discover the extent to which the company quietly was pursuing doing AI + Bio in parallel to these communications, at a minimum requires a deeper understanding as to why?

Again, the company may have particularly good reasons. However, the extent to which the discourse around AI has been shaped by this purported fear, and similarly the absence of concrete actions to address necessary AI safeguards that protect people from here-and-now harms and risks, should be considered in full.

3. Possible Institutional and Organization Loss of Legitimacy in a Changing World?

One final thought as to what our “Roaring 2020s” and this latest event might suggest, though I sincerely hope this is not the case. Historians thirty to forty years from now may look back and conclude that our decade was one where select actors on the world stage, with outsized influence and/or resources, decided to race ahead with their own agendas and not care about obtaining legitimacy for their actions.

By racing ahead without legitimacy, I mean racing ahead without some support and buy-in the public.

Instead, select actors on the world stage seem to not care about legitimate, public buy-in to their actions being supported beyond those of their own mental claims or select vested interests that don’t include the broader public. I sincerely hope this is not how historians will look back at the events happening in our “Roaring 2020s”.

However, I can only wonder given this latest revelation that an AI company that publicly seemed so concerned that AI + Bio purported “would be existential doom” and flooded the internet with these concerns including existential survival, was in parallel quietly standing up physical efforts to pursuing AI + Bio research efforts itself. There may be particularly good and valid reasons for this.

Given scant details so far, it’s clear we need more review and reporting. I can only hope we do get more information from independent actors seeking “why” and “to what end”?

I also hope that we do all that we can to incentivize actors both public and private to care about having legitimacy for their actions on the world stage, given that we all share planet Earth as our home.

Read more articles from Dr. David Bray here.