Re: It's too late baby, it's too late

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I’m sure there are people trying to use AI to infect all of our personal computers, to shut down the electrical grid, to empty all our bank accounts, to spread a biological weapon, etc. Any one of those could destroy society as we know it, intentionally or not.

"Your Local Epidemiologist" agrees:

Unsurprisingly, some people are already trying to use AI to do harm. Anthropic recently published five case studies exploring the use of Claude to assist with biological weapons development. Several centered on that same lethality/contagiousness trade-off:

- Making a virus spread more easily between people and dodge the immune system (chikungunya virus). This work may have been tied to a state or military research group.

- Helping a virus jump to a new species (bird flu). Someone used Claude to help bird flu adapt so it could spread more easily between mammals (a step toward spreading in humans).

- Making toxins more dangerous (venom peptides). Someone used Claude to build a big catalog of venom toxins and a system to make them more harmful.

- Studying how viruses dodge immune defenses (orthopoxviruses) like studying the genes that control how the immune system fights off viruses, like smallpox.

- Redesigning toxins to make them more dangerous, like a virus that causes severe, deadly bleeding.

Anthropic detected this activity, banned the accounts involved, and used what it learned to strengthen safeguards in newer models. But all of this was sped-up knowledge, and it doesn’t get around the needs of the physical world for this to actually be executed.

yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com - What AI can and cannot do in biosecurity

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