As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the biological sciences, it is pushing the future of biology in two opposing directions. AI can help bad actors generate recipes for biological weapons with just a few keystrokes and computational prompts. At the same time, AI can track disease outbreaks and deliver critical public health information to millions of people in real time – potentially stopping a deadly outbreak in its tracks. Annie Jacobsen, author of the forthcoming book Biological War, describes this moment as a race between offense and defense – between the proliferation of dark biology, where deadly pathogens are engineered in secret, and the promise of a new era of collective global health.
AI in epidemic intelligence
Every infectious disease outbreak begins with a handful of cases. Public health wins by learning about an outbreak before it spreads wide. One of AI's greatest values is its ability to compress the timeline between outbreak and detection. The World Health Organization (WHO) now uses AI to track the spread of infectious disease. At the WHO's Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin, Germany, computational systems leverage artificial intelligence and pathogenic surveillance to track and monitor infectious disease outbreaks around the world. At the center of this new way forward sits a computer-based system called Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources, or Eios ("EE-oss"), which acts as a giant filter for the world's minute-by-minute health information.
For decades, traditional epidemic intelligence has relied on official case counts. But data from hospitals, labs, research groups and other formal reporting systems takes days or weeks to register. Eios leverages the colossal power of modern computing and social media to get a more immediate picture of a disease outbreak. It focuses on unofficial reports, citizen chatter, local news reports, social media posts and more. Proficient across multiple languages, Eios scans millions of websites, feeds and platforms, searching for outbreaks as they happen. It scrapes, filters and ranks information. The goal is to pull signal from noise.
The offensive potential of AI
AI is a force multiplier, changing the biological sciences every day. The real question is whether public health officials can figure out how to deploy AI as a defensive tool faster than malicious actors deploy it as an offensive one. The offensive potential is no longer theoretical. AI systems can already help researchers navigate enormous bodies of biological knowledge that once required years of specialized training. They can explain complex laboratory techniques, locate obscure scientific literature, troubleshoot technical problems and suggest experimental designs. "None of these capabilities is inherently dangerous. Together, however, they lower the barrier to entering what was once a highly specialized field."
The greatest concern is that AIs can help humans create genuinely novel forms of biology. Scientists are already exploring mirror-image life and organisms designed with capabilities that do not exist in nature. Biology is unlike any other technology because what it produces can reproduce, spread across borders, mutate, and evolve on its own. "A software bug crashes a computer. A biological mistake can become self-propagating." Once a living organism is released into the world, it cannot simply be switched off or recalled. That biological weapons are alive is what makes them fundamentally different from every other class of weapon.
The race is already underway
Jacobsen notes that biological weapons have an extremely low barrier to entry. Unlike nuclear weapons, which require tightly controlled fissile material and complex delivery systems, biological weapons can be built with widely available laboratory tools, aided by increasingly powerful AI systems. "The technology to engineer life is advancing faster than the existing laws, treaties, and safeguards meant to govern it. This widening gap is where existential danger lives."
The point is pressure, not panic. Jacobsen argues that we need to develop AI systems to strengthen public health, accelerate disease detection and help build biological defenses as quickly as AI is accelerating biological design. Because once biology outruns our ability to contain it, there is no recalling what has already been unleashed upon the world.
