Via Bloomberg, this article:
Rocco Casagrande entered the White House grounds holding a black box slightly bigger than a Rubik’s Cube. Within it were a dozen test tubes with the ingredients that — if assembled correctly — had the potential to cause the next pandemic. An AI chatbot had given him the deadly recipe.
Casagrande, a biochemist and former United Nations weapons inspector, wasn’t planning to unleash a bioweapon in a room full of White House officials. He was there to brief them on the many ways artificial intelligence could teach users to make dangerous viruses. Tools like ChatGPT could help terrorists identify potent biological agents and secure the materials needed to make them, he told a room full of US officials in the spring of 2023. It wouldn’t be long before AI could not only help recreate existing pathogens, but also devise potentially more dangerous ones...
...Anthropic gave Casagrande free reign to brief the government on his findings. To get the point across to Biden administration officials, he turned to the MIT professor Esvelt to buy the synthetic DNA necessary to engineer one of the pathogens suggested by Claude. The materials, which aren’t infectious without technical lab work, weren’t hard to get. Claude even provided tips on how to purchase them.
Casagrande then assembled his black box of test tubes to carry into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, alongside the West Wing.
God it's easy to fool non-scientists. Synthetic DNA - eyeroll. You may as well have brought a raw steak or a strawberry plant and said that you could assemble your AI doom virus from that as well.
Call me hopelessly naive, but I am genuinely unimpressed with AI systems as a force multiplier for those who wish to engineer new chemical or biological weapons. If you have the intent to make biological weapons, university libraries and obscure veterinary collections are probably a much larger source of useful information than chatGPT or whatever AI program needs a hit of publicity-via-alarmism.
Maybe I'll eat my words when we are all dying from COVID-GPT but I doubt it.
