> But I don't think I've found anyone who is a domain expert who thinks granting everyone access to raw modes wouldn't meaningfully increase risk.

It depends how capable these raw models are. Biology as a field depends most on real-world knowledge, which is an expensive capability for open models that are targeting widespread deployment. It's quite plausible that even Opus 4 would be a lot more capable in these domains than the best universally accessible "raw models" today, quite unlike other domains such as coding or pure math. The securebio.org benchmark has spotty representation of openly available models, but it does show Kimi 2.5 being no more capable than GPT 5 mini, and clearly below o4-mini and Opus 4.0; which may be a plausible summary of where things stand today.

That's a good clarification. I've updated my comment to the "most capable models" to refer to the most recent releases.

And sure, and I love open models – I spent much of the past couple months doing additional RL on Qwen 3.6 35B A3B, Gemma 4, Kimi K2.6, and GLM 5.1. Without these open models, I'd be forced to do my research inside a frontier lab.

There's a balance to strike here, but I don't think the biological risk is overplayed. It would be very easy to accidentally cross the threshold of "meaningful" without adequate safeguards, and then be unable to undo what you've released to the world.