Dario Amodei

My views here are the same as they are for addressing autonomy risks.

We should start with transparency requirements, which help society measure, monitor, and collectively defend against risks without disrupting economic activity in a heavy-handed way.

Then, if and when we reach clearer thresholds of risk, we can craft legislation that more precisely targets these risks and has a lower chance of collateral damage.

In the particular case of bioweapons, I actually think that the time for such targeted legislation may be approaching soon.

Anthropic and other companies are learning more and more about the nature of biological risks and what is reasonable to require of companies in defending against them.

Fully defending against these risks may require working internationally, even with geopolitical adversaries, but there is precedent in treaties prohibiting the development of biological weapons.

I am generally a skeptic about most kinds of international cooperation on AI, but this may be one narrow area where there is some chance of achieving global restraint.

Even dictatorships do not want massive bioterrorist attacks.

Finally, the third countermeasure we can take is to try to develop defenses against biological attacks themselves.

This could include monitoring and tracking for early detection, investments in air purification R&D, such as far-UVC disinfection, rapid vaccine development that can respond and adapt to an attack, better personal protective equipment, PPE, and treatments or vaccinations for some of the most likely biological agents.

mRNA vaccines, which can be designed to respond to a particular virus or variant, are an early example of what is possible here.

Anthropic is excited to work with biotech and pharmaceutical companies on this problem.

But unfortunately I think our expectations on the defensive side should be limited.

There is an asymmetry between attack and defense in biology, because agents spread rapidly on their own, while defenses require detection, vaccination, and treatment to be organized across large numbers of people very quickly in response.

Unless the response is lightning quick, which it rarely is, much of the damage will be done before a response is possible.

It is conceivable that future technological improvements could shift this balance in favor of defense, and we should certainly use AI to help develop such technological advances, but until then, preventative safeguards will be our main line of defense.

It's worth a brief mention of cyberattacks here, since unlike biological attacks, AI-led cyberattacks have actually happened in the wild, including at a large scale and for state-sponsored espionage.

We expect these attacks to become more capable as models advance rapidly, until they are the main way in which cyberattacks are conducted.

I expect AI-led cyberattacks to become a serious and unprecedented threat to the integrity of computer systems around the world, and Anthropic is working very hard to shut down these attacks and eventually reliably prevent them from happening.

The reason I haven't focused on cyber as much as biology is that, one, cyber attacks are much less likely to kill people, certainly not at the scale of biological attacks, and, two, the offense-defense balance may be more tractable in cyber, where there is at least some hope that defense could keep up with, and even ideally outpace, AI attack if we invest in it properly.