AI and the Evolution of Biological National Security Risks

## Executive Summary

Not long after COVID-19 gave the world a glimpse of the catastrophic potential of biological events, experts began warning that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) could augur a world of bioterrorism, unprecedented superviruses, and novel targeted bioweapons. These dire warnings have risen to the highest levels of industry and government, from the CEOs of the world's leading AI labs raising alarms about new technical capabilities for would-be bioterrorists, to Vice President Kamala Harris’s concern that AI-enabled bioweapons “could endanger the very existence of humanity.”[1](https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/ai-and-the-evolution-of-biological-national-security-risks#fn1) If true, such developments would expose the United States to unprecedented catastrophic threats well beyond COVID-19’s scope of destruction. But assessing the degree to which these concerns are warranted—and what to do about them—requires weighing a range of complex factors, including:

- The history and current state of American biosecurity
- The diverse ways in which AI could alter existing biosecurity risks
- Which emerging technical AI capabilities would impact these risks
- Where interventions today are needed

This report considers these factors to provide policymakers with a broad understanding of the evolving intersection of AI and biotechnology, along with actionable recommendations to curb the worst risks to national security from biological threats.

The sources of catastrophic biological risks are varied. Historically, policymakers have underappreciated the risks posed by the routine activities of well-intentioned scientists, even as the number of high-risk biosecurity labs and the frequency of dangerous incidents—perhaps including COVID-19 itself—continue to grow. State actors have traditionally been a source of considerable biosecurity risk, not least the Soviet Union’s shockingly large bioweapons program. But the unwieldiness and imprecision of bioweapons has meant that states remain unlikely to field large-scale biological attacks in the near term, even though the U.S. State Department expresses concerns about the potential bioweapons capabilities of North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. On the other hand, nonstate actors—including lone wolves, terrorists, and apocalyptic groups—have an unnerving track record of attempting biological attacks, but with limited success due to the intrinsic complexity of building and wielding such delicate capabilities.

Today, fast-moving advancements in biotechnology—independent of AI developments—are changing many of these risks. A combination of new gene editing techniques, gene sequencing methods, and DNA synthesis tools is opening a new world of possibilities in synthetic biology for greater precision in genetic manipulation and, with it, a new world of risks from the development of powerful bioweapons and biological accidents alike. Cloud labs, which conduct experiments on others’ 

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