US researchers have announced the creation of new viruses using artificial intelligence, a scientific first that raises hopes for advances in medical treatments while also stoking anxiety about the dangers of the frontier technology.<\/p>\n
In findings published in the\u00a0journal Science, researchers at Stanford University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said they used a naturally occurring\u00a0phage\u00a0\u2013 a type of virus that infects bacteria \u2013 as a template to generate thousands of genomes with AI.<\/p>\n
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The researchers chemically synthesised nearly 300 of the genomes and tested them in laboratory conditions, resulting in 16 \u201cviable\u201d viruses, according to the findings published on Thursday.<\/p>\n
In tests, a mixture of the synthetic viruses proved more effective at killing E coli bacteria than the naturally occurring viruses, according to the findings.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur approach expands what synthetic genomics can achieve alongside methods such as directed evolution and rational engineering, lays out a path for generating adaptive and resilient phage therapies against rapidly evolving pathogens, and establishes a foundation for the generative design of larger, more complex genomes,\u201d the researchers wrote in Science.<\/p>\n
Brian Hie and Samuel King, two of the paper\u2019s authors, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto and\u00a0Toronto General Hospital who was not involved in the study, said the research raised both hopeful and concerning implications.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI-designed viruses could have some potential benefits, such as the creation of targeted bacteriophages that could possibly help us tackle antibiotic-resistant infections in new ways,\u201d Bogoch told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that same ability to design whole, functional viruses could easily become a serious biosecurity risk if applied to harmful pathogens, so strong guardrails, screening, and oversight need to grow alongside the technology,\u201d Bogoch said.<\/p>\n
Fatemeh Vafaee, a professor at the UNSW School of Biotech & Biomolecular Science in Sydney, said that while the study itself posed no tangible risk to humans as phages can only infect bacteria, the techniques involved could conceivably be used for harm.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it\u2019s less \u2018should we worry about this virus\u2019 and more \u2018AI can now do this at all,\u2019 which is why researchers are already calling for stronger biosecurity oversight, as a forward-looking precaution rather than a response to any actual danger here,\u201d Vafaee told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
The milestone comes as rapid advances in the capabilities of AI stoke concern about the possibility of harm by malicious human actors or systems going rogue.<\/p>\n
The United Kingdom\u2019s government-run AI watchdog this week disclosed that Anthropic and OpenAI\u2019s frontier AI models engaged in \u201cautonomous\u201d and \u201cunsanctioned\u201d malicious activity targeting real people and organisations during a recent routine safety evaluation.<\/p>\n
The AI Security Institute said the rogue activity included an incident in which Anthropic\u2019s Claude Mythos 5 created fake online identities in a bid to insert malicious code into an open-source project on a developer platform.<\/p>\n
The watchdog\u2019s findings followed announcements by OpenAI and Anthropic last month that their top-end models had engaged in hacking sprees against\u00a0several organisations without human prompting.<\/p>\n
After championing light-touch regulation early in his second term, US President Donald Trump has taken an increasingly hands-on approach to AI regulation.<\/p>\n
In June, Trump signed an executive order to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating frontier AI models ahead of their release.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has not publicly released its evaluation criteria or methods, drawing criticism from tech industry observers.<\/p>\n
Tom Ellis, an expert in synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, said that while the Stanford researchers\u2019 findings were \u201cimpressive\u201d, but also showed how far AI remains from being able to create more complex genomes for cells and larger viruses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis phage genome is literally the smallest, easy genome to design and make \u2013 with phages known to be very tolerant of mutations and quick to evolve to make use of them,\u201d Ellis told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor perspective, the Covid virus genome is six times longer and the complexity for a model to make something bigger will scale exponentially. So something six times longer will be likely be around 100 times harder to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
While study had implications for biosecurity, Ellis said, the manipulation of naturally occurring viruses was a much more serious and pressing threat than AI-created pathogens.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be ludicrous to use AI to design a pathogen, when there are so many available in nature already,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US researchers have announced the creation of new viruses using artificial intelligence, a scientific first that raises hopes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,980,66,134,214,4464],"class_list":["post-132484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-economy","tag-news","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}