Artificial intelligence is usually discussed as a technology that writes, predicts, searches and reasons. A much less noticed development in biotechnology points to a more consequential possibility: AI is beginning not merely to understand the machinery of life, but to design it. That is why the recent attention to an experiment in which AI-generated genetic sequences were turned into functioning viruses deserves more than a passing mention. The immediate significance is not that scientists have produced viruses capable of infecting people. They have not.

The organisms involved are bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria, and the laboratory work was confined to E. coli. But the achievement marks an important change in what AI can do in the biological world. Researchers used genome-scale AI models to generate complete viral genomes rather than merely modifying a few existing genes. Hundreds of designs were synthesised and tested; 16 became functional bacteriophages. Some were capable of attacking bacterial strains that had developed resistance to naturally occurring phages.

The experiment therefore demonstrated something that is qualitatively different from predicting the structure of a protein or identifying a promising drug molecule: a machine-generated........

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