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The next AI safety fight may actually be about DNA

AI could make bioweapons easier to build. A rare coalition wants to stop that now.

AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things.

That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 other experts in tech, biology, and national security policy — recently signed on to an open letter calling for more robust regulations around gene synthesis. They’re all concerned that AI systems might be used to help develop and even deploy dangerous biological weapons designed through gene synthesis, which is used to chemically build custom DNA sequences in a lab, rather than relying solely on existing natural DNA templates.

The simple fact of multiple CEOs of fiercely competitive AI companies aligning on anything is remarkable. But to understand how they came to this agreement, we have to take a step back to understand what gene synthesis is, how it works, and why the possibility of AI-assisted misuse of the technology generates so much fear.

Modern microbiology owes a lot to gene synthesis. Researchers can order synthetic genes from commercial DNA providers to develop new vaccines, drugs, and gene therapies for inherited diseases like hemophilia; produce human insulin, boost agricultural output, and more. Gene synthesis is a foundational technology for successful CAR-T cell therapies for cancer and many diagnostic tools. The demand for synthetic DNA is growing globally, and it’s never been cheaper or simpler to write genetic code.

But for all its power, gene synthesis also carries substantial risk. The same technology that can enable life-saving new gene therapies can also assist in the creation of deadly pathogens by assembling some of the same nucleotides — the genetic building blocks that create the code for all of life — in a different order.

Most US companies that provide gene synthesis services screen orders for genetic sequences of concern, such as those that can make a pathogen more dangerous or transmissible, and to verify that customers are legitimate. They do so voluntarily, well aware of the potential dangers.

But not every provider does so. “As long as screening remains voluntary, some companies will not do it,” Becky Mackelprang, the director for security programs at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, told me over email. There’s a real risk that bad actors could find a gene synthesis company with more lax standards, and that might mean disaster.

We’ve been fortunate so far. “This technology has been commercially deployed for more than 20 years and has never been misused to cause harm,” James Diggans, the vice president of policy and biosecurity at gene synthesis company Twist Bioscience, told me over email.

But AI threatens to complicate matters, opening up new frontiers of risk.

Both large language models (LLMs) and AI biodesign tools enable scientists to design entirely novel genetic sequences. This is a boon for industrial and medical applications — and a challenge for current screening systems, which use similarity to known........

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