Preparing for future AI risks in biology

Advanced AI models have the power to rapidly accelerate scientific discovery, one of the many ways frontier AI models will benefit humanity. In biology, these models are already helping scientists⁠(opens in a new window) identify which new drugs are most likely to succeed in human trials. Soon, they could also accelerate drug discovery, design better vaccines, create enzymes for sustainable fuels, and uncover new treatments for rare diseases to open up new possibilities across medicine, public health, and environmental science.

At the same time, these models raise important dual-use considerations: enabling scientific advancement while maintaining the barrier to harmful information. The same underlying capabilities driving progress, such as reasoning over biological data, predicting chemical reactions, or guiding lab experiments, could also potentially be misused to help people with minimal expertise to recreate biological threats or assist highly skilled actors in creating bioweapons. Physical access to labs and sensitive materials remains a barrier—however those barriers are not absolute.

We expect that upcoming AI models will reach ‘High’ levels of capability in biology, as measured by our Preparedness Framework⁠(opens in a new window)^*, and we’re taking a multi-pronged approach to put mitigations in place. In this post, we cover:

• Developing a responsible approach to advancing biological capabilities

• Collaborating with external domain experts including government entities and national labs

• Training models to safely handle dual-use biological requests

• Building detection, monitoring, and enforcement systems

• Adversarial red-teaming our mitigations with experts

• Deploying security controls

• What’s ahead

Our approach

Strengthening defenses in biology

We’re sharing how we’re preparing, both what’s already in place and what’s ahead, while holding back sensitive details that could help bad actors get around our safeguards.