The machine in the lab: India’s WMD law has an AI-shaped gap

When applied to research, ‘Dual-use Research’ (DUR) also means scientific research capable of being misused through weaponization and other means. ‘Dual-use Research of Concern’ (DURC) means research requiring little to no modification to cause harm.

Anthropic’s September 2026 report on the biological misuse of AI has raised a pressing question: who bears dual-use research liability when General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) Models with systemic risk are involved? ‘Dual-use’ means information, knowledge, product and technology developed for a well-intended application but with the potential to be misused to cause harm. When applied to research, ‘Dual-use Research’ (DUR) also means scientific research capable of being misused through weaponization and other means. ‘Dual-use Research of Concern’ (DURC) means research requiring little to no modification to cause harm.

Consider the report’s first case study. US frontier AI Models were accessed through grey market resellers and synthetic accounts by an LLM platform serving academic researchers linked to civilian and military research institutions in countries where Anthropic does not provide service. The researchers were conducting highly concerning gain-of-function research (GOFR) on the Chikungunya virus. Unable to bypass the safety classifiers, the developers built a fallback mechanism to reroute sensitive prompts to more permissive models.

In the second case, a researcher accessed Claude from an unsupported region and studied mutations in highly pathogenic avian influenza (bird flu). These mutations had the potential to cause a human pandemic and........

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