The AI industry is suddenly rife with existential fears, with senior figures claiming it could "kill us all" within a decade.
One particular fear is that AI could develop a biological agent, or a bioweapon.
At the same time, biologists are showing AI can help them with useful research – including those employed at Anthropic, who have just announced AI has helped them discover a new class of enzymes they claim "could represent a new gene editing mechanism ".
Labs around the world have had the tools to make biological agents, like viruses, for decades.
Brendan Walker-Munro, a security researcher at Southern Cross University, says AI changes this.
David Heslop, a public health researcher at the University of New South Wales, says the speed of AI progress makes him "very concerned".
An advanced AI model could give a user outside traditional systems the information needed to make a bioweapon.
Equally in Dr Heslop's opinion, an AI tool like a large language model could help a bad actor plan to deploy material, including pre-existing viruses or toxins.
AI could also be used to attack broader public health systems, like hospital infrastructure.
David Kainer, a computational biologist at the University of Queensland, says the same tools applied to plant science could "potentially destroy large amounts of food production".
In 2022, researchers at the Collaborations Pharmaceuticals company showed they could use their company's AI software to make toxins.
AI program Alphafold, for instance, has been used to predict the shape of proteins for medicinal research, winning its creators the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.