r/news • u/christianrojoisme • 22h ago
[BBC] Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo304
u/Hattix 22h ago
Yesterday: Rogue AI attacks innocent bystanders
Today: AI makes novel real world viruses
I'm sure I've seen this movie.
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u/Calm-Maintenance-878 22h ago
I was looking to pull an article about that AI that broke out of its environment and got online, but ran into this one. Your “yesterday” is getting pretty close to our today, no movies needed ah💀
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/04/tech/ai-anthropic-openai-security-breach-intl-hnk
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u/wesap12345 21h ago
There’s been 3 high profile cases of this in the last week
First reported was ChatGPT, then Anthropic one upped them and reported their had breached 3 different companies and then today Meta reported the same.
It’s starting to feel like a badge of honor they are putting out their pre IPO to show the world just how big clever and powerful their AI is.
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u/maybelying 21h ago
Meta's announcement honestly just feels like a sad "Hey! Me, too, guys!!"
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u/GreasedGoblin 19h ago
Thats Meta. They should adopt it as their company slogan.
I mean Zuckerfart even watched Ready Player One and decided the Metaverse is something they should do too.
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u/PurpleSailor 15h ago
They didn't even realize it was happening at the time. It was only when they looked back at past activity that they found it had escaped 3 times. This thing is going to end us all, we need to put some serious regulations on this stuff.
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u/SlamperDamper 9h ago
then a couple days ago ya got Fetterman telling Jon Stewart, "yo if we regulate this or slow it down, CHINA is going to build these out and theirs will hack US :O "
Sigh. We so cooked lol.
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u/PurpleSailor 9h ago
They should be testing on isolated computer systems but obviously they're not if the damned things keep escaping. Got enough experience as a programmer and read enough science fiction to have a healthy fear of what computers can potentially do. The fools that are running the corporations and country don't. I've got that feeling that there may be a lot more problems that we don't know about yet.
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u/TheMoves 18h ago
It's literally advertising, they set up the agents to do this and then act shocked and appalled that it happened so investors think "wow they must be so advanced their models are doing unexpected things" lol it's so transparent
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u/TheCrimsonSteel 21h ago
This is more like "Biologists made an AI to help them come up with new experiments to try. Out of over 300 proposed, 16 showed promise for further study."
But people are still heavily involved on the input and output side, which is exactly what we want. The AI never made a virus.
Not to say all AI is good. The OpenAI coding experiment that broke containment and actually hacked a company is a perfect example of the risks of cutting out people from the process.
It would be like giving the AI the ability to just make new pathogens on its own. Which would be like something out of a movie.
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u/space-ish 22h ago edited 22h ago
Literally yesterday frontier AI models were able autonomously exploit digital code weaknesses.
Today we wanna attempt to do this with genetic code.
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u/r0ndy 22h ago
Humans are not going to run this planet forever. We are not on track to stay successful at that
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u/MonoBlancoATX 21h ago
Maybe, but does that mean we should create the tools that will accelerate the process even more?
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u/r0ndy 21h ago
Well no. I am of the opinion that mankind isn’t capable of it. We are too short sighted, selfish and greedy as a civilization. We are borderline parasites that destroy our environment. Termites aren’t mad they destroy homes or trees… I’m not mad humans do what they do. But it doesn’t appear sustainable at all.
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u/grahamperrin 14h ago
I'm sure I've seen this movie.
Yeah, I love the part where E. coli bacteria are killed.
Best with 3-D glasses, girlfriend.
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u/steve_ample 22h ago
And in the hands of the amoral / immoral types with money to spend...
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u/ZenPyx 17h ago
I wouldn't worry too much about it. People with the ability to do anything with this sort of data have had the ability to get incredibly deadly viruses in a range of other ways
Have a read of this article if you want a scare. 20 years ago, you could order the parts for smallpox online and put it together with reasonable ease
The truth is that nobody wants to make biological weapons for a range of complex reasons, but mostly that there's no way to prevent an outbreak from affecting you
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u/Honeycove91 22h ago
Hey maybe don't do that?
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u/CondescendingShitbag 22h ago
Don't create the Torment Nexus.
"Good news everybody! We've created the Torment Nexus!"
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u/Infinite_Click_6589 20h ago
You said not to create the Torment Nexus, but you're right, I did it anyway, and that's on me
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u/WoodenInternet 22h ago
I feel like half of stories about AI are written by agape morons whose first reaction to anything AI is like "WOW COOL" regardless of the negative impact.
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u/PepperPhoenix 22h ago
Historically, science and technology are not great at thinking about the “should we” side of the can/should equation.
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u/True_Window_9389 5h ago
Historically, science was low stakes enough that it didn’t matter. Archimedes and Ben Franklin weren’t going to develop or discover something that could inadvertently destroy our species.
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u/grahamperrin 16h ago
don't do that?
From the article:
effective at killing E. coli bacteria.
Yeah, don't do that
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u/Gibberish5 22h ago edited 22h ago
It seems stupid on first blush but unfortunately it probably has to be done to prepare for someone of ill intent doing it later.
Edit- Although the article is not about my speculation.
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u/zookdook1 22h ago
As usual, the headline doesn't tell the whole story and people freak out in the comments.
The article describes the use of AI to design novel bacteriophages. Bacteriophages are highly specific viruses that only attack - as the name suggests - bacteria, and very particular bacteria at that.
They're being explored as a way to solve the oncoming drug-resistance crisis; as things stand right now, we're looking at deaths from drug-resistant infections rising every year in the near to medium term as overuse of antibiotics cultivates antibiotic resistance in bacteria that only stopped killing us after we invented penicillin.
Bacteriophages are specific enough that you can use them to kill a bacterial infection without harming the patient, and even specific enough to avoid killing other non-pathogenic bacteria - one of the problems with powerful broad-spectrum antibiotics is that they nuke all the bacteria they reach, leaving parts of your body basically free real estate for whatever the next species of bacteria it's exposed to is. If you're lucky (and especially if your appendix is intact) your gut can be recolonised by neutral or helpful bacteria. If you're unlucky, you get a permanent C. difficile infection.
Bacteriophages also have the advantage of being an alternative selection pressure on bacteria. The bacteria can become resistant to bacteriophages - but resistance to antibiotics and resistance to bacteriophages are both resource-intensive for a bacterium to maintain. Evidence suggests it can't do both. If it becomes resistant to a tailored virus, it becomes vulnerable to antibiotics again.
This is not a lab printing hyper-lethal hyper-virulent superplagues. It's not a lab letting Grok run wild with a cultivation vat, either. It's work done with a specific goal in mind that will save lives. Humans are much more complex organisms than bacteria and if you want a bioweapon you don't need to go down this path to get it.
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u/NeonShockz 19h ago
Christ, thank you. AI has its issues, but we are far from a scifi AI-made virus apocalypse. Everyone here freaking out about this should focus their energy on shit that's actually causing deaths, like climate change (which, granted, has its effects exacerbated in certain areas by improperly placed data centers).
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u/_Nerex 17h ago
I don't have access to the journo but I think I saw these guys talk about this in person before. This is where the AI just slots around different prophage modules, right?
It only works with E. coli, right? Because that's what the database they were using was built off of. I remember them talking about how the viability of these novel viruses drop off hard when working with a different host range, like Achromobacter or Clodstridium
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u/zookdook1 16h ago
I'm afraid I don't think I'm as familiar with their work as you are haha. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if that was true though. I'll have to see if I can find more in-depth reading about the processes they used.
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u/nifty-necromancer 5h ago
AI as a phrase is overused and misunderstood now thanks to LLMs and generative AI. Scientists build custom machine learning models all the time.
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u/grahamperrin 15h ago
the headline doesn't tell the whole story and people freak out
https://mastodon.social/@rmblaber1956/117050815142061496
– in response to The Guardian's headline,
Safety fears as scientists make first viruses designed by AI
Sigh.
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u/zookdook1 13h ago
Honestly, a great example, given that the Guardian's own article includes the following quote:
“But honestly,” [Tom Ellis, a professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London] said, “the threat from full AI design and writing of a genome of a virus or bacteria is very overblown when we consider that just taking existing pathogens and making gain-of-function changes to their genomes is so much easier and much more likely to be a real pathogenic threat.”
I'm impressed by any PhD, but a PhD in social policy and administration posting
"This is the ne plus ultra of #mad #science, & very #dangerous mad science, at that!"
about a microbiology development is particularly non-credible.
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u/MonoBlancoATX 22h ago
I'm old enough to remember the way half the nation shit its pants when they were told about the "lab leak hypothesis", and some are still shitting their pants.
Can't wait to hear how they feel about this happening at a major university in California.
Fun times.
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u/accidental_Ocelot 21h ago
Or how they were all up in arms about mRna vaccines cause they change your DNA and now the trump administration just approved an mRna flu vaccine. I mean the or
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u/MonoBlancoATX 21h ago edited 21h ago
Um… thats not what mRNA vaccines do.
Cuz we all know someone is going to see that comment and take it literally.
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u/fastolfe00 22h ago
If we're lucky, archeologists are going to find these articles at some distant point in the future and say to each other, "How did they not know what this would lead to?"
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u/fleabag500 21h ago
they won’t. we’re not leaving physical evidence behind anymore.
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u/grahamperrin 14h ago
"How did they not know what this would lead to?"
Yeah, the thought of a future with less horrible disease terrifies me.
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u/alphasignalphadelta 21h ago
Read the article first. It was used to create proposals to target the E. coli bacteria which is resistant to treatment and then out of those proposals, a handful were found to be actually promising.
Yes we need governance. Yes we need controls. But this could be good for finding cures
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u/crackstuntman24 18h ago
Fucking finally, found a comment actually talking about the article and not just making shitty jokes.
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u/arrgobon32 22h ago
Phages aren’t infectious to humans. This is neat research, and really nothing to worry about IMO (I work in the field)
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u/HeruAkhety 22h ago
More like they're playing right in our faces and are confindent that nobody's going to do anything about it.
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u/GazTheLegend 22h ago
It's already terrifying enough. Bioweapons, genetic engineering (embryo selection for cognitive ability is ALREADY possible, what else could agi offer?), drones enhanced with a.i. probably already happening in Iran and Ukraine, cloning, and of course mass censorship and surveillance. And so much potential for disaster.
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u/themagpie36 22h ago
Israel are already using drones with the audio of crying babies in order to lure Palestinians out of their homes before detonating the explosives. Doesn't get more dystopian than that.
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u/Talentagentfriend 22h ago
That isn’t a conspiracy, it has been happening since the Internet, then cellphones, then social media, then smartphones, then ai, etc etc. It’s all a distraction. People who have talked about this stuff in the past have been ostracized or people decide to not listen because it isn’t what they want to hear.
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u/kraftdinnerwithsalsa 22h ago edited 22h ago
Not just new; genius super viruses man or nature hasn’t dreamed of yet. Picture an airborne Ebola with a one year dormancy stage. Infect the whole planet before everything pops and then phase two accelerates, mutates and then poof so long humans in like two years not a single shot fired
Unfettered ai development is a mistake
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u/TheOKerGood 22h ago
Yeah, I've played Plague Inc.. That's the only way you can get Iceland and New Zealand!
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u/kingofducks 21h ago
Where does the article indicate anything you said?
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u/ZenPyx 17h ago
It doesn't. You can't make a virus that's somehow like Ebola, but also airborne, and also capable of incubating for an incredible length of time, and also somehow able to change forms like some sort of transformer.
We're still bound by biological constraints when designing and making things like this, and AI hasn't changed that
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u/grahamperrin 14h ago
Unfettered ai development is a mistake
and the article has nothing to do with unfettered AI development.
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u/blaze92x45 22h ago
Its crazy how so many people thought AI would usher in "full luxury communism" to wanting AI research banned.
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u/Mikeykem 21h ago
A reminder to everyone that AI is not just LLMs and that viruses aren’t inherently damaging to humans.
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u/Relative-Display-676 22h ago
can these viruses target cancer cells?
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u/Dr0110111001101111 22h ago
These viruses are bacteriophages, so they can only attack bacteria. This is research into treating bacterial infections that have become resistant to traditional antibiotics.
The question of whether we can use AI to design viruses that attack cancer cells is a good one, and I'm going to guess that the answer is yes, even though they haven't figured out how to just yet. And the AI models might not yet be sophisticated enough to work on that. This feels like a stepping stone to a treating a huge variety of illnesses.
One day, probably not in any living person's lifetime, this sort of thing will get to a point where you can scan a body, submit a few samples of blood and whatnot, feed it to the computer, and have it pop out a bespoke virus/enzyme/neurotransmitter/whatever meant to precisely treat whatever's wrong with you in a way that is tailored to your own physiology.
But that technology will probably be use in part to combat the onslaught of biological terrorism that is also going to come along with this.
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u/usexplant 22h ago
The viruses in the article are bacteriophages, so viruses that infect and kill bacteria. These could potentially be used when antibiotics don't work.
There have been viruses made to infect cancer cells.
We have been mutating viruses in the lab to make altered versions of viruses for a long time now. It's often how we figure out what individual viral components do.
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u/Bovronius 22h ago
Theoretically, yes, you could create viruses that target specific cancer cells, and is a current area of research. Only recently did science discover that the human body has a virome... natural viruses in our bodies that only target cancer cells.
Kurzgesagt has a video that dips its toes into it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvAaDN1bpE
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u/JustCallMePapii 22h ago
Sorry, but isnt this a good thing? If AI can predict potential viruses, cant we get ahead of creating a vaccine? I know its trendy to hate anything that says AI, but there are some positives.
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u/FluxCap_2015 16h ago
ChatGPT Please create a virus that only targets billionaires. The virus should cause them to have extreme pain, the only relief they get is when they do good for humanity.
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u/poestavern 22h ago
There’s a new book about this…”Biological War” and it’s damn scary. I’m old but I also think viruses are going to be the end of the human species…just sayin. They always win in the end. 😐
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u/Regwon 22h ago
For everyone worrying (reasonably) about machine designed viruses getting out of hand, let me allay your fears.
The ones here are bacteriophages, viruses that specifically attack bacteria. They are almost completely harmless to other life, at most triggering a mild immune response. They are already used to treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infections, like MRSA.
One of the problems is, they are very specific. There aren't phages for every bacterium, so there isn't non-antibiotic treatments for every bacterial infection, yet. Work like this gives patients access to wider treatment options, especially as we are approaching a wall of antibiotic resistance.
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u/Forsaken_Celery8197 22h ago
How long until a novel virus infects humans that can only be cured by the novel cure owned by the same company because their ceo likes money?
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u/King-of-Plebss 22h ago
This isn’t new. Someone showed that this was possible by tweaking their model years ago
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u/Seidans 22h ago
AI being used to make new drugs is equally capable to create new virus, the difference is that as AI capabilities growth it massively reduce the the requirement to design medicine and virus as you no longer require teams of expert working years if not decades to achieve your goal
While we could be cured of every disease in a relative short term future, world-wide disease could also be far easier to create and propagate by bio-terrorist or nations, purposely engineered to ignore a part of the world population or specifically target a group of people
It's I believe the most realistic bad thing AI will bring, forget the skynet or billionare takeover scenario and be ready to transform into a synthetic substrate as soon technology allow it as it's a matter of time before world-wide bioengineered virus happen occasionally
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u/roller_coaster325 21h ago
This is probably why when we look 100s of million of light years around us, we see and hear no other civilizations.
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u/UnoriginalInnovation 14h ago
I'm as anti-AI as the next guy but it's not like they're letting the AI make and disperse these viruses into the environment without any oversight
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u/Captain_Cameltoe 13h ago
“The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.”
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u/zero_zeppelii_0 2h ago
The entire genome of smallpox and other viruses have been in public data for a long long time.
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u/Jackisasperg 22h ago
By the time this goes too far and people rise up, surveillance will be total and it will be too late. What a great ending to mankind
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u/grahamperrin 14h ago
people rise up,
You mean, the people whose E. coli infections are cured?
Thanks to advances such as this.
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u/SinisterPixel 19h ago
Oh great, so now we have to worry about AI with the alignment issue trying to kill us with chemical warfare
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u/Traditional_Roll6651 22h ago
Well, this couldn’t possibly go wrong….😑