Expert warns AI could be used to help commit a biological attack

Lawmakers on both of the sides of the aisle have raised yet another potential danger of artificial intelligence – the possibility of AI being used to create a biological attack. Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, July 25. He said AI could help otherwise unskilled actors develop biological weapons that could be used in an attack.

“Today, certain steps in bioweapons production involve knowledge that can’t be found on Google or in textbooks and requires a high level of specialized expertise, this being one of the things that currently keeps us safe from attacks,” Amodei testified Tuesday. “We found that today’s AI tools can fill in some of these steps albeit incompletely and unreliably. In other words, they’re showing the first nascent signs of danger.”

According to Straight Arrow News’ exclusive Media Miss™ tool, this story has only been covered by sources in the center and on the right. This, despite Democrats joining Republicans in sounding the alarm at the hearing.

“The dangers are not just extinction, but loss of jobs, one of potentially the worst nightmares we have,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said at the hearing. “Each day these issues are more common, more serious and more difficult to solve, and we can’t repeat the mistakes that we made on social media, which was to delay and disregard the dangers.”

Also testifying at the hearing was Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California. He warned that AI could be used for disinformation.

“With these systems we can present to the system a great deal of information about an individual – everything that they have ever written or published on Twitter or Facebook, their social media presence, their floor speeches, and train the system to generate a disinformation campaign, particularly for that person,” Russell testified.

The hearing came days after AI companies like OpenAI, Google’s parent company Alphabet and Meta committed to implement measures to help make the technology safer. These measures include watermarking AI-generated content.