AI can design viruses, toxins and other bioweapons. How worried should we be?

It’s hard to imagine that a snail could kill a person, but a particularly venomous group of marine molluscs called cone snails can. Their stings contain a cocktail of small proteins called conotoxins, some of which can block ion channels in the nervous system. No antivenom exists. There are hundreds of thousands of conotoxin structures, and many are harmless to people or even medicinally useful: an approved treatment for chronic pain is derived from one, for instance. But research on specific dangerous conotoxins is highly restricted in some countries. So, in 2024, when Chinese scientists reported developing an artificial-intelligence tool to design conotoxins 1 , it raised eyebrows in some quarters. In an e-mail to a private AI and biotechnology discussion group seen by Nature , a senior US government employee flagged the study as a possible biosecurity risk. The employee, who asked not to be named because of concerns for their job, felt it was especially concerning that the conotoxin AI is based on an open-source protein language model developed by US scientists. The textile cone snail ( Conus textile ), one of a number of venomous species of cone snail. Credit: Pascual Fernandez Gomez/iStock via Getty One of the conotoxin study’s authors told Nature that the concern is unwarranted. The work was aimed squarely at discovering drugs, says Weiwei Xue, a computational chemist at Chongqing University in China and a co-author of the paper. …