Some people worry that the rapid AI progress driving the "AI cybersecurity revolution" of 2026 could soon spill over into biology, potentially leading to extinction-level synthetic pandemics.

While I would not panic, I would take the risk seriously.

Biology is obviously not the same as cybersecurity -- cybersecurity is a fully verifiable domain, where you can synthetically train unbounded capabilities, and therefore where superhuman skill is straightforwardly achievable. Meanwhile biology is not a verifiable domain, so capability remains critically dependent on human-generated data. Plus, biology has critical non-digital bottlenecks, such as the requirement for physical wet-lab experimentation.

However, it is plausible that synthetic pandemics were already feasible without AI, and that AI might lead to the proliferation of these capabilities. That is a real risk, and we are not prepared for it.