I'm far from anything resembling an expert in biological weapons, but this seems to me puzzlingly overconfident in the opposite direction.

> PhD students in 2026 using state-of-the-art AI software are spending months or years trying to design simple peptide binders that inhibit some enzyme or pull down some protein

This confuses me, as state-of-the-art AI software is moving quite quickly. Any software that is currently state-of-the-art AI.. hasn't existed for years, maybe not even for months.

It also seems quite odd to claim that there are no sufficiently dangerous diseases when we have high-security research labs dedicated to exploring.. exactly these kinds of diseases.

And, even if it's not a disgruntled teenager, it just takes one leak from a lab that has 10xd productivity using AI tools.

This is a real risk that existed before AI, one that I think we can now confidently say that society is under-prepared for since 2020. It is certainly magnified by AI, even if it's not 100x.

The author even seems to recognize this:

> So, if you’re worried about AI-designed superviruses, think COVID, not Ebola. And if you’re now a little less worried, maybe you understand where I’m coming from.

This is exactly where I think most people are starting from, and that's _why we're worried_.

Think of it this way: if it wasn't generally crazy difficult to create even somewhat effective bioweapons (due to the reasons given in the article), there would've been non-trivial use of said weapons in terrorism, war, assassination attempts, etc over time. But we're still "stuck" with using primarily bombs, guns and - to far less extent - poisons.

If you quote the article, then you are implicitly telling others that you have read it.

But it's pretty clear you have not?