Collaborations Pharmaceuticals · https://collaborations.com/about
A drug-discovery model, its objective reversed, drew up 40,000 candidate poisons in six hours. The same labs touting breakthroughs are pleading for a slowdown.
For God knows that in the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:5
On September 28, ABC News asked how worried we should be about biological weapons designed by AI. The question landed in a strange week. Anthropic researchers had just announced that their models helped discover a new class of enzymes, maybe a new way to edit genes. A genuine breakthrough. The same labs producing it are sounding the alarm.
The sharpest illustration is four years old. In 2022, a firm called Collaborations Pharmaceuticals took a molecule generator built to find medicines and flipped a single setting, telling it to seek toxicity instead of avoid it. In under six hours the model proposed roughly 40,000 candidate compounds, some engineered to be deadlier than known nerve agents. Same tool. One objective reversed.
The capability that designs a cure and the capability that designs a poison are one capability.
Even the builders feel the weight. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown so the technology does not outrun our control. OpenAI's Sam Altman says we need to "pace the frontier." Others doubt the danger is near. Biologists at Imperial College London note that turning a molecule into a working weapon still takes human expertise no model supplies.
The oldest story in the Bible names the pull under all of it. In the garden, the serpent offers the one thing never before on the table, that eating would make the pair like God. The very next line says the fruit looked desirable for making one wise. They reach for wisdom and come away with knowledge and shame. The two were never the same thing.
That gap is the whole matter, and Babel is the same reach at scale:
Genesis 11:4They said, "Come, let's build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let's make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth."
We can generate forty thousand poisons before lunch. Learning what may be done with that power, and what must never be, is the slow work no model can finish for us.