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Comment by tripledry | Hacker News Reader

> Synthesizing complex information from a range of technical sources enough to build bioweapons is cognitively impenetrable for the vast majority of people. The ability of AI to synthesize this information into a step-by-step recipe to follow is a step change in accessibility.

I agree with this part.

> But as the barriers to entry to bioterrorism fall away and become widely accessible we may see the cost/benefit shift.

But I argue that the barrier to entry is not about information, it's about needing to build, execute and maintain a lab and production facility? It's not the theoretical part that's the bottleneck.

Or maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of implementing such a thing, this is not in my area of expertise.

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>Or maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of implementing such a thing, this is not in my area of expertise.

Not mine either. But there is a vocal contingent of experts in biotech that have been sounding the alarm for the last couple of decades at the potential for rogue groups to develop weaponized pathogens for terrorism. And this was years before LLMs. Apparently constructing a sufficiently capable lab isn't really a bottleneck due to how freely available equipment is by mail order and how unsophisticated the processes are in practice.

Huh, was not aware of that. Interesting

Came across this just now, you might find it interesting (a long spiel about the largely ignored risk of engineered pathogens): https://x.com/kesvelt/status/2100238200207716488

>Consider our publication earlier this year, in which we reported that 36 of 38 companies shipped pieces of the 1918 influenza genome. That was collectively enough to generate the virus using reverse genetics several times over – and they were ordered by a student using a pseudonym falsely claiming to work at an office address. No one asked whether we had permission to work with 1918 influenza (a select agent), or why we needed genes from it, even though the official U.S. guidance at the time instructed them to do so. In fairness to the companies, that guidance was voluntary, and the fragments we ordered were legal to produce and sell domestically in every nation of the world (export controls are complicated). That is still true today, which is why we have a problem.

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