AI just created a working novel genomic virus. The U.S. isn't prepared for that.
Last edited Fri Sep 26, 2025, 10:59 AM - Edit history (1)
A stunning scientific accomplishment brings both great promise and great risk.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/25/artificial-intelligence-advance-virus-created/
https://archive.ph/i2bSJ
We’re nowhere near ready for a world in which artificial intelligence can create a working virus, but we need to be — because that’s the world we’re now living in.
In a remarkable paper released this month, scientists at Stanford University showed that computers can design new viruses that can then be created in the lab. How is that possible? Think of ChatGPT, which learned to write by studying patterns in English. The Stanford team used the same idea on the fundamental building block of life, training “genomic language models” on the DNA of bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria but not humans — to see whether a computer could learn their genetic grammar well enough to write something new.
Turns out it could. The AI created novel viral genomes, which the researchers then built and tested on a harmless strain of E. coli. Many of them worked. Some were even stronger than their natural counterparts, and several succeeded in killing bacteria that had evolved resistance to natural bacteriophages.
The scientists proceeded with appropriate caution. They limited their work to viruses that can’t infect humans and ran experiments under strict safety rules. But the essential fact is hard to ignore: Computers can now invent viable — even potent — viruses.
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I can remember artists and record companies, radio screaming that they offered a way to "steal" artists and companies "intellectual" property by enabling people to just buy one album and record 10 copies for their friends. Being able to make mix tapes on top of recording songs directly from radio allowed them to just turn off radio, and the obligatory commercials, and listen to multiple artists in one sitting in a very convenient and often "free" way. You could argue that just having a buddy record an album for you so you wouldn't have to go to the record store and thereby being bypassed the exposure to new and different artists and music could be a form of dumbing people down by limiting their exposure to new things. After all, that's pre-emptively what learning is at it's core.
This is a very crude comparison I admit but my point is every tool that man has invented is a 2 sided sword. I am by no means a fan of AI being used in ANY nefarious manner. I am also one that believes AI is NOWHERE near a thinking machine thats going to become aware and snuff us out.... yet. If anything, like the atomic bomb and the insane things we were going to do with it when we first built them (i.e. putting reactors in airplanes, blasting mines open with them etc.....), we hopefully will learn our lesson (usually the hard way) with AI and corral it, more importantly its nefarious uses, before it can do too much harm. The harm that AI has the potential to do to us is from the people wielding it. The great good and advancement that it has is from the people wielding it. It's not from AI itself. I like baseball unless someone uses a bat to beat someone else.
Every example above one can point to incredible GOOD things that came out of those tools, from PC's (Cassette tapes brought the home PC into being as the original hard drive), the myriad of medical and other very helpful things that came from a massively destructive device like the bomb. Once again crude examples but I think they get across my thought process here.
I think of it like the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey, when the first primitive human picked up a bone and smashed another one.
WE are the problem, or the solution, not the TOOL.
Respectfully 
I'd even say 99% of the time it's the solution (I'm no scientist obviously lol). Just from looking at ourselves I'd say thats the biggest reason there aren't rockets flying around every solar system with a Goldilocks planet. Its very hard for intelligence to progress beyond a certain technological level. I buy that 100%
Since dumpie & Muskrat like to kill cancer research funds, how much of that money now sits in
their pockets? 
