Stanford University researchers succeed in creating the first virus designed by artificial intelligence (AI), Nature reports on the 20th. The photo shows viruses surrounding E. coli B cells. The pinkish virus is designed using AI. /Science Photo Library
It seems like the theme from a science-fiction thriller film, but it just happened for real.
A team of researchers in the U.S. gave an AI model millions of viral genomes and told it: make something new. Out came not copies or mutations, but completely synthetic viruses: structures that have never been made in nature.
They were then released on drug-resistant E. coli in the lab. Sixteen of them were “alive” enough to infect and kill. Think about that: a machine produced sequences of code that resulted in biological entities that could kill real life organisms.
These are not "life" in terms of classical definitions, yet they behaved like living things, attacked, replicated, and destroyed.
The researchers used a simple DNA virus (ΦX174) as a foundation point, but the AI went far beyond it, designing original viral blueprints. The AI-designed phage even accomplished in the lab what nature failed to do.
The goal of this project is medical, an avenue to new therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections. But it also gently crosses a threshold: AI did not just write code. It made synthetic biology that could kill.
The technology is now public. It’s unregulated. It’s untested by peer review. And there’s just one simple question left: what will happen when the machine begins designing things that we cannot control, or even comprehend?
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