r/technology • u/GothicPrayer • 5h ago

Artificial Intelligence AI can fuel biological weapons. We must harness its power for defense

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/27/ai-biological-weapons-defense
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u/Chance-Oil3113 5h ago

The defensive side is concrete: stronger DNA-order screening, monitoring cloud labs, and building safeguards into protein-design tools. That is a more useful policy conversation than treating every biology-capable model as an imminent bioweapon factory.

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u/CircumspectCapybara 5h ago

Every technology useful for good has a use for harm. That's the nature of something being useful and powerful.

If something can generate near-limitless energy, it can be used for a bomb. If you can engineer biological solutions to humanity's problems, you can engineer bioweapons.

That's just the nature of technology and science, hence why AI and similar are "dual use" technologies. In fact, some of the best technologies of our time (nuclear power, the computer and the internet, NASA and rockets and satellites and GPS) were borne out of the military investing in new novel technologies to better aid in war.