Scientists are using AI to design new viruses. Should they be?

Scientists are using AI to design new viruses. Should they be?

Research is outpacing regulation to govern artificial intelligence-designed biology

Scientists have crossed a threshold in artificial intelligence (AI): Using the technology, researchers created real, entirely new to science viruses. The achievement is impressive, and raises obvious fears: Could AI, in the not-too-distant future, make viruses more deadly than those seen in nature?

The viruses the researchers created are not Frankenstein’s monsters. They are more than 90 percent similar to certain existing bacteria-infecting viruses, or bacteriophages. They are dangerous only to Escherichia coli . And they were designed by an AI model that wasn’t trained on viruses that could infect plants or animals.

But these safety measures, while welcome, were largely voluntary. The research, which published last week in Science , showed that AI-enabled biotechnology is moving much faster than regulation.

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“The frontier is moving very quickly,” says Toby Webster, a program director at Sentinel Bio, a nonprofit that researches biotech safeguards.

In fact, the Science paper describing the AI-designed bacteriophages is already old. It was first published as a preprint on the bioRxiv server in September 2025; the model is open-source and has already been fine-tuned for other tasks .