Researchers explain why you shouldn't freak out about AI unleashing a killer virus

Worried about an AI apocalypse? Some researchers say one of the most extreme versions of that scenario is overblown.

The debate has reached a fever pitch in the week since Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher, quit Anthropic and warned that it and his other former employer, OpenAI, were "gambling with our lives" as they raced toward self-improving superintelligence.

Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic's alignment stress-testing team, backed Coxon, saying he personally believes there is a greater-than-10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

But other researchers have pointed to the gap between what AI could do in the digital world and what it would require to cause real-world harm.

They gave the example of a lethal biological virus created by AI, one of the darkest scenarios that was also cited as a reason to pace AI development by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in an essay this month.

AI could design the virus on a computer, but it would be limited by its inability to manufacture it in the real world, the researchers said.

Anselm Levskaya, a staff research engineer at Google who says he has built DNA synthesizers and engineered viruses, wrote on X on Monday that a viral sequence would still have to be physically assembled in a lab and would require a system capable of producing virus particles.

It would then require extensive selection and testing to determine whether it can replicate, spread, evade immune defenses, and remain dangerous — properties Levskaya said depend on complex biological processes that he said cannot simply be designed from a computer.

Eric Xing, the president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI and a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, put it more simply: generating a virus blueprint and producing a real virus are "completely different things."

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The gap is in "the material, the manufacturing, and actual biological viability," he wrote on X on Monday. Treating the two as equivalent, he added, "is either an intentional attention-harnessing lie or true ignorance."

Researchers said the same logic extends beyond biology. To turn a plan into real-world harm, an AI would need access to physical equipment, money, computer systems, or people.