Bioweapons Are the Greatest Threat Even Without AI, Annie Jacobsen Says

WIRED has republished an interview that first appeared in Mother Jones, in which journalist Michael Mechanic talks with Annie Jacobsen about her new book, "Biological War: A Scenario," published in late July. The point is that the danger of biological weapons predates artificial intelligence by decades and is real without it.

A fresh context came from Anthropic's misuse report, published earlier in September, which documented five cases in which foreign scientists tried to evade Claude's guardrails on "gain of function" inquiries. The company withheld the answers and closed the accounts, while noting the users' motives may not have been malicious.

Why bioweapons top the list

Jacobsen says a US Defense Department document reprinted in her book, which maps the spectrum of weapons-of-mass-destruction threats, places nuclear weapons at the most destructive end, with biological weapons a close second. In her view biological weapons are the greatest overall threat because the threshold for entry is extremely low, which makes an event more likely.

A nuclear weapon requires weapons-grade fissile material and the infrastructure to contain it: an intercontinental ballistic missile, a bomber, or a nuclear-armed submarine. In other words, you have to be a state. Access to biological agents, by contrast, is close to universal. There are 3,600 BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories in the world and far fewer terrorist organizations, so statistically an accident is far more likely than a deliberate attack.

That is why her scenario opens with a lab leak rather than an intentional release. The book recounts the case of the Soviet scientist Nikolai Ustinov, who infected himself with the Marburg virus and died of hemorrhagic fever.

AI is only part of the picture

Jacobsen deliberately left AI out of the book, to show how easily a scientist can tweak a pathogen and set off a near extinction-level pandemic even without it. Still, she considers the attention to AI-enabled bio-threats useful: Dr. Nicholas Bergman, director of the BSL-4 lab at Fort Detrick, told her that after the book appeared staff kept asking whether such a thing could really happen.

In the acknowledgements she raises the concept of "mirror life," explained to her by biosecurity expert David Relman, which in theory could extinguish all humans.

Open questions on defense

According to Jacobsen, biological war cannot really be defended against on the scale that nuclear arsenal control implies. The interview notes that the CIA and other intelligence agencies run counterproliferation operations and that some biological weapons programs in terrorist hands have been shut down, but the risk of an accident still outweighs a deliberate strike. The US State Department's position is that Russia and North Korea have illegal biological weapons programs, while China and Iran have programs of concern.