On Monday, October 19, the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense hosted the virtual event “Russia’s Bioweapons Legacy and the Plague Scare.” The panel examined the death of a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia a

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This is the first part of a two-part article. You may read Part 1 of the article here.

Monitor Trajectories, Not Merely Answers
Traditional content moderation is concerned with a discrete output: did the model provide harmful instructions? Agent safety requires attention to sequences.

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This is the first part of a two-part article.

The discussion of artificial intelligence and biological weapons often swings between two unhelpful fantasies. One imagines a harmless chatbot that merely summarizes journal articles. The other imagines a machine that develops a will of its own, decides to wage biological war, and proceeds independently to manufacture a pathogen.

Neither image captures the more immediate danger.

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Abstract: After 9/11, the Bush administration was preoccupied by the possibility of terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), so much so that the United States went to war in Iraq. In fact, in the post-9/11 era, terrorists only experimented with crude WMD of low lethality. However, now that we are in the age of AI and synthetic biology, terrorists—who are often well educated—will likely be able to create pathogens in a manner that was not available to militants of an earlier era.

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India has adopted a new, more assertive approach in fighting terrorism in recent years, which was on full display in the first burst of Operation Sindoor in May 2026, when several terror infrastructure sites across Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) were targeted and taken out by Indian armed forces using precision weapons.

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The deadly attacks of 11 September 2001 were followed by another critical terrorist incident in the United States, wherein anonymous letters laced with the deadly anthrax spores were sent to several media companies and post offices. The attacks claimed the lives of five people through the inhalation of anthrax and infected several others who came in contact with the postal envelopes.

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The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology offers great promise for medicine and public health, including the potential to yield transformative societal benefits. Yet this same convergence could introduce serious global health and national security risks. As capabilities continue to advance, AI-enabled biotechnology might lower the technical, operational, and motivational barriers to creating biological weapons. It might also enable high-consequence attacks involving enhanced or novel pathogens.

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