AI labs urge Congress to stop DNA orders from enabling pandemics
openai, anthropic, and microsoft execs signed a letter urging us laws to screen synthetic dna orders, citing that ai lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons.
ai leaders including sam altman and dario amodei signed a letter organized by the institute for progress, calling for federal laws to require gene synthesis companies to screen customers and sequences. this follows a microsoft study showing ai models can design dangerous protein sequences that bypass current security filters. the signatories argue that while bioterror is rare, combining cheap dna synthesis with advanced llms significantly lowers the barrier to creating pandemic-capable pathogens, necessitating stricter oversight than the current voluntary or funding-dependent frameworks.