AI 業界のリーダーらが AI を利用した生物兵器への厳格な保護措置を要求

Robert Hart

is a London-based reporter at *The Verge* covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for *Forbes*.

Some of the AI industry’s biggest rivals have put their many, many grievances aside for a common cause: making it harder for people to use their technology to develop biological weapons. In an open letter to US lawmakers, tech leaders are pressing Congress to enact rules closing what they say is an alarming biosecurity gap that could help trigger a global pandemic.

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories urging US lawmakers to require companies selling synthetic DNA and RNA — genetic material that can ordered online and assembled in a lab — to screen purchases for sequences that could be used to make dangerous pathogens. The fear is that AI tools could make it easier to design potentially dangerous sequences, order them from manufacturers, and use them in ways that would previously have required more specialized expertise.

Other signers include Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AI-based protein prediction. The letter was also signed by prominent scientists, national security and policy experts, and executives from biotech companies including Twist Bioscience and Ansa Biotechnologies, both major sellers of synthetic genetic material. The letter was reportedly organized by two think tanks: the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Progress.

Scientists have long warned that advances in synthetic biology could make it easier for scientists to engineer dangerous organisms or even resurrect long-dead pathogens — work that could cause devastation if misused, mishandled, or released by accident.