Both Democrat and Republican senators have sounded the alarm on the potential malevolent use of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop biological weapons. The bipartisan alarm was raised during a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday (July 25).
Subcommittee chair Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat raised concerns and said the aim of the hearing was to bring in laws that could help avoid the worst-case scenario.
“The experts building these systems are warning of human extinction. The goal for this hearing is to lay the ground for legislation. To go from general principles to specific recommendations. To use this hearing to write laws,” Blumenthal said in his opening remarks.
Meanwhile, Republican Senator Josh Hawley called for safeguards “that will ensure this new technology is actually good for the American people.”
At the hearing, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned that while AI is not quite capable yet, it may someday potentially aid non-state actors in creating biological weapons.
“Certain steps in bioweapons production involve knowledge that can’t be found on Google or in textbooks and requires a high level of expertise,” said Amodei.
“We found that today’s AI tools can fill in some of these steps. By enabling many more actors to carry out large-scale biological attacks, we believe this represents a grave threat to US national security,” he added.
Senators propose legislation
The senate hearing comes a little more than a week after Senators Ed Markey and Ted Budd proposed a bipartisan legislation that would push the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to study potential biosecurity risks by AI.
The bill, titled ‘‘Artificial Intelligence and Biosecurity Risk Assessment” would charge the HHS assistant secretary to prepare and evaluate how AI could be used to develop biosecurity threats such as chemical weapons and novel pathogens.
“As AI grows in power and influence, we may face the real prospect of AI-generated threats like biological or chemical weapons. The federal government must not be caught flat-footed on these threats and should begin to prepare now,” said Budd in a press release published.
“Either we prevent the risks now, or Americans will be left dealing with the consequences for decades to come,” added Markey.
(With inputs from agencies)
