Just need to wait for this thing to be open sourced :)
lol it won't tho...
Security in the form of "pay to play" is just kicking the bigger issue down the road.
sure, a malevolent state actor could swing it, but they could make a bioweapon without Mythos's help already.
also, vaccine production and disease surveillance have ramped up very quickly. they will ramp up further, despite political setbacks. it's a cat and mouse game that favors the defenders IMO.
but the bioterrorism narrative is useful FUD to spin open-weight models as existentially dangerous. I am far more worried about Anthropic's own goals than the goals of some crackpot in a shed.
How so? I'm actually against most of the "safety-tuning" that anthropic does, but this seems fundamentally untrue, a close analogue being video game cheat development. I think in general the cheat developer has an advantage and the cheats generally proliferate for quite a while before being patched.
Finance and biology do come across as two similar high level systems. But while we can employ KYC, fraud detection, and various auditing techniques to finance, I don’t know what you do for biology. You can easily run an algorithm over every transaction a person makes in their account but there’s no equivalent for every cell, every bacteria strain, every virus in the human body.
the adaptive immune system effectively does KYC by checking the antigens presented on the surfaces of cells. the thymus selects for B-cells (iirc?) which don't react to a corpus of the body's own antigens, but cover a wide library of everything else. when it sees something it doesn't recognize, it reproduces, warns the rest of the immune system and marks targets. that's why our immune systems can eventually conquer almost every pathogen we encounter, if we can survive long enough for it to do its work.
but the KYC I was referring to was KYC that vendors of oligonucleotides (should) be doing, to keep people from ordering nefarious sequences.
also, afaik the most effective way of developing pathogens is through serial passage through humanized mice or something like that - directed evolution at a small scale, selecting for traits. AI simply isn't needed for that. I don't think information or intelligence has been the bottleneck for bioterrorism, it's motivation and resources - same as for any other kind of biology research program.
The reason we are not being attacked is not lack of technology access.
Column A, Column B. Building a small explosive device isn't hard. Building a million is very difficult, doing it covertly virtually impossible without the resources of a nation-state.
The problem with biologics is the self-assembly and replication machinery comes for "free." So the numpties who might otherwise blow up a trash can [1] now have a real chance of taking out a million people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_New_York_and_New_Jersey_b...
Humorously, whether I choose to participate in this hypothetical or not, I am already betting my ass.
This whole situation feels like the game [1].
// Claude, make antiviral nanobots that defend me from 6ft virus. Make no mistakes.