> One place where the threat is more real is in the possibility of vibe coding a pandemic virus, but that should be narrowly targeted at generating DNA sequences for viruses. Labs which generate custom DNA should also have reasonable heuristics for detecting likely dangerous product. The chances of covid coming from a lab leak are in the maddening 25-75% range which vaguely means ‘We don’t know’, but ‘lab leak’ includes a lot of things.

No it didn't. It differs by 1,000 base pairs from the closest known relative virus that we knew about before the pandemic, and we have no good idea what all those mutations wind up doing. And the PRAAR furin cleavage site was a previously unknown sequence and not one that humans would have guessed.

And we don't have good heuristics for what mutations would completely inactivate a virus versus enhancing its virulence.

Actual scientists won't be able to vibecode up some pandemic viruses because we have no idea how to do that and LLMs are just going to hallucinate.