Biosecurity

The Dual-Use Dilemma In July 2024, the Arc Institute published a paper in Science describing Evo, a 7.6 billion parameter foundation model trained on 300 billion nucleotides spanning all domains of life. The model could generate functional DNA sequences, predict fitness effects of mutations, and even design novel regulatory elements. It was a scientific breakthrough—and immediately raised a question that every researcher in biological AI now confronts: Could this same technology be used to create biological weapons? ...

Introduction: The Open Science Paradox In May 2024, Google DeepMind published AlphaFold 3 in Nature, describing a system that could predict the structure of protein complexes with DNA, RNA, ligands, and small molecules—a dramatic leap beyond AlphaFold 2’s protein-only predictions. But there was a catch: the code wasn’t released. For six months, researchers could read about the breakthrough but couldn’t reproduce it, build on it, or verify the claims independently. ...