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sterlind | on: Claude Fable 5
you need a lot more than the nucleotide sequence to make a virus. you need the DNA or RNA to be synthesized, assembled, packaged properly. and long sequences are pretty hard to do. you need a lot of equipment, or you need to order from services. the oligo synth services can harden their KYC and/or screen for suspicious sequences.

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.

theLiminator | parent
> it's a cat and mouse game that favors the defenders IMO

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.

ceigey | root | parent | next
Video games are an interesting analogy since they often trade security for performance, trusting clients about world state quite a bit.

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.

sterlind | root | parent
(disclaimer: layperson remembering how the immune system works.)

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.

sterlind | root | parent
I'm bullish on mRNA vaccine technology to release the "patches" much more quickly. there was widespread resistance to this during covid, but covid wasn't horribly lethal. if airborne Ebola spread as productively as covid, for example, I doubt there'd be many anti-vaxxers left (one way or another!) the acceleration of biology research that might accelerate pathogen development should also accelerate the development of broad-spectrum mRNA vaccines with high persistence.

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.