Building a Defense-in

The use of artificial intelligence in biology offers great promise but could also endanger global health and national security. In this report, the authors develop a layered mitigation strategy that is robust against a variety of threat scenarios. The authors examine the strengths and weaknesses of a network of nine mitigations, describe areas of mutual reinforcement, and propose next steps for decisionmakers.

Building a Defense-in-Depth Biosecurity Strategy for the AI Era

Steph Guerra, Aurelia Attal-Juncqua, John P. Tarangelo, Casey Aveggio, Katie Dammer, David Glickstein

The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology offers great promise for medicine and public health, including the potential to yield transformative societal benefits. Yet this same convergence could introduce serious global health and national security risks. As capabilities continue to advance, AI-enabled biotechnology might lower the technical, operational, and motivational barriers to creating biological weapons. It might also enable high-consequence attacks involving enhanced or novel pathogens. The dual-use nature of biotechnology requires proactive mitigation measures to counter these threats.

In this report, the authors develop a defense-in-depth mitigation strategy that is robust, complementary, and deployable across a wide variety of threat scenarios. To create the strategy, the authors assessed the capabilities of various actor types across different steps of the bioweapon-development pathway prior to an attack, from ideation to weaponization. They also examined how different mitigations could add friction to primary milestones that nefarious actors must bypass to successfully execute an attack using AI-enabled biological weapons.

The authors describe a network of nine mitigations, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and areas of mutual reinforcement, and propose next steps for how decisionmakers in the public and private sectors can work collaboratively to advance this strategy.

This research was independently initiated and conducted by the Center on AI, Security, and Technology within RAND Global and Emerging Risks using income from operations and gifts and grants from philanthropic supporters.

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