I'm confused by this. I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school. You can apparently buy a kit to do it online for $39.99 USD.
I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.
I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.