Ideas: More AI-resilient biosecurity with the Paraphrase Project
Now, let’s rewind two years. Almost to the day, Bruce and I uncovered a vulnerability. While preparing a case study for a workshop on AI and biosecurity, we discovered that open-source AI protein design tools could be used to redesign toxic proteins in ways that could bypass biosecurity screening systems, systems set up to identify incoming orders of concern.
Now in that work, we created an AI pipeline from open-source tools that could essentially “paraphrase” the amino acid sequences—reformulating them while working to preserve their structure and potentially their function.
These paraphrased sequences could evade the screening systems used by major DNA synthesis companies, and these are the systems that scientists rely on to safely produce AI-designed proteins.
Now, experts in the field described this finding