> There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.

If these capabilities were available to the public, someone somewhere would make a biological weapon or create a virus we've never seen before that could kill many millions of people.

Stanford researchers have demonstrated it’s possible [1].

[1]: "AI creates 16 new viruses from scratch, showing promise for drug resistance and drawing warnings about potential for misuse" - https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/health/ai-viruses-bacteriopha...

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hgoel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Biologists already addressed this idiocy a few weeks ago [1]. Making a biological weapon requires facilities that only some nation states and comparable companies, have access to.

AI isn't going to magically assemble a DNA sequence for you and a computer design is not a guarantee of something that works.

AI restrictionists love to pretend that their toys will, with the power of intelligence, magically bypass fundamental limitations of reality to conjure up fantastical weapons of mass destruction if they throw enough computers at the task. Unfortunately for them, that is not how the world works.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-ai-apocalypse-sk...

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girvo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We already have controls for that: we control access to the reagents and equipment needed. Yknow, like we always have.

Information is not dangerous. This is a ridiculous argument to me, but maybe my chemistry degree has me biased.

	▲	jiggawatts an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not to mention that making an actual novel virus requires thousands of dollars of equipment, serious lab skills, and even then is so dangerous that the wannabe terrorist is more likely to infect and kill themselves than cause mass causalities. It's the equivalent of making pipe bombs at home. The instructions are out in the public, but that's not a problem because the idiots that make pipe bombs blow themselves up more often than they succeed in doing terrorism.