AI leaders call for tougher protections against AI-aided bioweapons

Key points

• 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.