To deter bioterrorism, U.S. imposes new rules on ordering synthetic DNA

Also, see the "lab leak" discourse. To me the question seemed irrelevant because the countermeasures would be exactly the same, but that's not how other people think; they're not interested in a mask mandate against a naturally occuring virus, but if they can tie the exact same genetically identical virus to a human enemy? The social status of the threat goes up!

Regular old measles? Not sexy. But a convenient vector for the internal threat. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/08/americas-measles-ep...

Made-up AI-assisted super-measles? Doesn't exist yet. But it's a great super sexy threat to defend against. You just have to ignore the kids dying of boring old regular naturally occuring measles in the meantime.

2 bad things can be threats at the same time. Even 10,000 things can be.

I can imagine that terrorist are sad now that they cannot use their preferred advanced bioengineering skills acquired through great efforts posing as scientist towards the so far unsuspecting services providing them with harmful DNA building blocks and now have to turn to much much more pedestrian methods instead of the heightened sophistication they crave.

Or to sources from other countries.

Assuming you have a medium city (half million people) and a suitably toxic substance (assuming something like dimethylmercury where you'd need at least 100mg per person => 50kg for the city), then you need to dump a lot of it into the water supply, because people use a lot more water than they actually ingest or even come into direct contact with (every person uses ~100l/day, but realistically ingest only like 2-5l).

So you'd need to dump literally a ton of an extremely toxic substance directly into the drinking water supply. I'm not concerned because that seems difficult enough (and likely to get the perpetrator caught beforehand while ordering mercury compounds by the barrel or sth).

AI is already killing people, from denial of medical coverage to civilian casualties when an overwhelmed soldier just clicks "Ok". But worrying about AI viruses is easier than accepting that terrorist attacks are low-tech and, statistically speaking, the next one will probably be performed with a car, a gun, or a knife.

All it takes is one of these crypto/ai-grifter-30-under-30-chuckle fucks with more money than brains to put a lab together and create the actual torment nexus, and we are all fucked.

This is old stuff, being implemented and getting lots of news.

You don't need AI to generate known toxin or pathogen sequences (as these are already known).

And if AI could design novel toxins, this screening wouldn't catch those anyway.

It's not like you can prompt it to create super AIDS in an afternoon but I'm sure an uncensored model could help you do real harm.

I see LLMs as being essentially irrelevant for whether someone can do this. It's lab skills, planning skills, biological experiment debugging skills.

"Why did my plasmid not start getting expressed, how did I screw up?" "How do I make this huge protein" aren't LLM questions, they're university level biology questions, and "why is my protein growth tank not making the thing I want, and what is the grey stuff, do I need to put clean it again" is an experience question.

Putting checks on DNA synthesis puts making the horrible stuff out of the range of what high schoolers can do though.

I got into this hobby briefly (pre-LLMs) before realising how much of a loaded gun it is, and that I’m just not qualified to safely muck around with this stuff.

Usually the synthesis of oligonuclotides is done with phosphoramidite chemistry [0]. So tell us more about those enzymes to make DNA molecules from scratch.

[0] https://www.twistbioscience.com/blog/science/simple-guide-ph...

Why does he call it an "otherwise pretty great policy"?

He's claiming that the policy needs to be more comprehensive. You're concluding that it doesn't pass a cost/benefit test. That's not at all the same claim!

But yes, this is stupid. No one who is inclined to build a biological WMD is going to be more than mildly inconvenienced by supply restrictions. DNA isn't plutonium.

"procure synthetic nucleic acids and benchtop synthesis equipment from U.S.-approved suppliers. Those vendors must verify their customers’ identities and screen orders for potentially dangerous sequences that, for example, could encode toxins or pathogens."

If this was just about feds self-policing, they wouldn't have the customer identity requirement.

Probably they're taking this route because AI is moving fast and Congress moves slowly.

(Also, my comment is great, because I wrote something instead of nothing.)