Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery

A teachable moment for dual-use

“…First, the experiment is a powerful example of a concrete dual-use risk concern arising from converging technologies and this could be used to raise awareness of the security dimension of life sciences research. Second, our experience as a whole -obtained from reviewer and editorial feedback on our paper 7 to interactions with many groups after publication including with several interviewers -taught us the importance of increasing awareness in a responsible, non-alarmist way. Third, we need to consider what these dual-use findings mean for responsible science in drug discovery, and what action the community should be taking.…”

“…These seminal events involved the physical synthesis of a biological agent. However, the time may have come to also consider dual-use risk of the development of toxic agents in silico, in the light of the alarming results of a computational experiment we recently performed for a biennial arms control conference 7 ; we used a generative artificial intelligence (AI) approach previously developed for drug discovery applications, and found it could easily design a range of nerve agents including VX. The experiment demonstrated the alarming speed and ease with which such software -based on open-source tools and datasets from the public domain -could be used for bad purposes.…”

Problems and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence

“…Virtual potentially toxic molecules are one of the many methods that can be used to predict the toxicity of a molecule and can be used to detect molecules with a high potential for toxicity. "It is possible to design virtual potential toxic molecules with little effort, time, or computational resources", according to AI studies (Urbina et al, 2022). This raises the possibility that drug-discovery projects created for positive purposes, such as treating diseases, could be abused.…”

<i>Commentary</i>: Unexpected Novel Chemical Weapon Agents Designed by Innocuous Drug-Development AI (Artificial Intelligence) Algorithm

“…In the reported twist, the process was essentially inverted-toxicity, instead of therapeutic efficacy, was rewarded. [15] And a predicted low LD50 (potent lethality) was the goal and criterion for iterative optimization (Figure 3). The Figure 3.…”