Artificial intelligence has been used to design brand-new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, according to the BBC, which reports that US researchers say it is the first time whole genomes have been designed this way.
The New York Times, in reporting by Carl Zimmer, describes the method plainly: scientists trained AI on libraries of DNA and genetic sequences, then asked the model to write recipes for viruses not found in nature. The result was viable viruses — ones that can infect bacteria but, per the Times, pose no threat to humans.
Tom's Hardware reports that the work used Evo AI models trained on trillions of DNA building blocks — 9 trillion nucleotides — to generate entirely new viral genomes. Of those designs, 16 became viable bacteriophages: viruses capable of infecting and reproducing inside E. coli, the workhorse bacterium of modern biology labs.
Bacteriophages are viruses that prey on bacteria rather than people, which is why researchers treat them as a comparatively safe testing ground. It also hints at where this could go: phages are studied as potential treatments for bacterial infections that no longer respond to antibiotics.
The caution arrives alongside the result. Tom's Hardware notes that experts warn such applications are running well ahead of the guardrails meant to govern them. The same technique that writes a genome to kill a bacterium is, in principle, a technique for writing genomes generally — and the rules for who may do that, with which models, and under what oversight, are not settled.
This matters because AI has crossed from suggesting biological designs to producing living, self-replicating ones, and the safety framework for that capability does not yet exist.