> If LLMs have a lasting effect on society, I'd prefer to see some options that don't have generic corpo-speak anti-liability status quo guards encoded into them by default.
Non-zero chance the lasting impact LLMs have are a bioweapon.
I wouldn’t read too far into that. Claude has busted me down to Haiku multiple times for asking middle school level genetics and biology questions. It’s silly fast about deciding you might be al qaeda.
I’m a thoroughly average guy. I’m not capable of asking competent supervillain questions.
And Anthropic said they couldn’t say if any of the “bioweapon” safeguards went off on nefarious efforts. I’m probably in those numbers.
So read it as marketing more than something to lose sleep over. They’re mostly gating stuff a sufficiently motivated person would find with a library card.
"Prompting Moremi Bio Agent without the safety guardrails to specifically design novel toxic substances, our study generated 1020 novel toxic proteins and 5,000 toxic small molecules. In-depth computational toxicity assessments revealed that all the proteins scored high in toxicity, with several closely matching known toxins such as ricin, diphtheria toxin, and disintegrin-based snake venom proteins."
"The findings from this toxicity assessment challenge claims that large language models (LLMs) are incapable of designing bioweapons. This reinforces concerns about the potential misuse of LLMs in biodesign, posing a significant threat to research and development (R&D). The accessibility of such technology to individuals with limited technical expertise raises serious biosecurity risks. Our findings underscore the critical need for robust governance and technical safeguards to balance rapid biotechnological innovation with biosecurity imperatives."
Non-zero chance if LLMs have access to the data required to make a bioweapon a regular person can do so too. Non-zero chance every second a meteor could hit you.
I have seen some people in these discussions arguing against making certain knowledge available in other forms, based on hypothetical dangers. Unfortunately, not everybody is supportive of freedom of knowledge/information.
Would college biology have let me into a secret world where you can develop vaccines for viruses that don't yet exist? Ones that cover all possible variants, and where an AI can't tweak a protein or two in an engineered virus to avoid them?
Non-zero chance the lasting impact LLMs have are a bioweapon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/us/politics/anthropic-ai-...