AI is making it dramatically easier to engineer biology. Frontier models can now help design novel pathogens, and outperform expert virologists at troubleshooting wet-lab work¹. As these models proliferate, so does the number of people able to cause serious harm.

But a bad actor still needs physical access to biological material. Securing access to synthetic DNA is the most promising chokepoint², a view now shared by the frontier AI labs, the DNA synthesis industry and the policy community, who have signed an open letter calling for mandatory customer screening³. Regulation is proposed in the US and EU, with the UK likely to follow.

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