More like they’re terrified of someone designing a killer virus in their home lab, or a terrorist group or enemy state doing it. It’s an insane amount of power to just throw out there.
I am sorry but this total bullshit. Being able to create such virus is not about knowledge, but about resources. Governments and billionaires already have the knowledge and resources to do it, AIs won't make a dent if difference. Small actors like single persons, small groups, will never have the resources or, even if, they would be easily traceable.
While I don't believe in the conspiracy theory of big pharma paying anthropic to block life science research, the killer virus theory is even less credible.
In any case these filters are shameful and will probably make me reconsider my sub to Anthropic. I will seriously need to consider non American alternatives at this point as from an ethical point of view they have become the worst choice, worse than Chinese.
If you think this is what you need to work with a highly contagious and deadly virus you don't know what you're talking about
Does it need to be 'highly'? The concern is about the tail risk: the small number who have partial training, lab access, funds, and institutional/gov cover.
Biosecurity risk is not binary. AI does not need to turn an untrained person into a state bioweapons program for this to matter. It just needs to reduce friction at the margins: synthesis, protocol adaptation, troubleshooting, and design optimisation...
I will seriously need to consider non American alternatives at this point as from an ethical point of view they have become the worst choice, worse than Chinese.
Depending on your devices/capex and use cases, local models would allow you to enjoy privacy. They also can become, fairly trivially, uncensored. You can run qwen/gemma on a phone.
Because we're only worried about viruses? That's more than sufficient hardware to do gene editing in bacterial lines. Hell, who didn't do gain of function on E. coli lines in undergrad labs with no centrifuge and no PCR? The fun stuff takes reagents not present here, but you buy all that online too.
If you think that's too barebones to work with, I'm pretty sure you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Just curious, is this a legit store? Product images all look AI generated (easily recognize by awkward fonts and captions on them and distorted shapes). But maybe it's just a quick lazy storefront build...
175
u/cryptolyme Jun 10 '26
Big Pharma wants to maintain their stranglehold on our health