ost on X.

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The AI-Designed Bioweapon Arms Race

[2025.10.30] Interesting article about the arms race between AI systems that
invent/design new biological pathogens, and AI systems that detect them before
they?re created:

The team started with a basic test: use AI tools to design variants of the toxin
ricin, then test them against the software that is used to screen DNA orders.
The results of the test suggested there was a risk of dangerous protein variants
slipping past existing screening software, so the situation was treated like the
equivalent of a zero-day vulnerability.

[...]

Details of that original test are being made available today as part of a much
larger analysis that extends the approach to a large range of toxic proteins.
Starting with 72 toxins, the researchers used three open source AI packages to
generate a total of about 75,000 potential protein variants.

And this is where things get a little complicated. Many of the AI-designed
protein variants are going to end up being non-functional, either subtly or
catastrophically failing to fold up into the correct configuration to create an
active toxin.

[...]

In any case, DNA sequences encoding all 75,000 designs were fed into the
software that screens DNA orders for potential threats. One thing that was very
clear is that there were huge variations in the ability of the four screening
programs to flag these variant designs as threatening. Two of them seemed to do
a pretty good job, one was mixed, and another let most of them through. Three of
the software packages were updated in response to this performance, which
significantly improved their ability to pick out variants.

There was also a clear trend in all four screening packages: The closer the
variant was to the original structurally, the more likely the package (both
before and after the patches) was to be able to flag it as a threat. In all
cases, there was also a cluster of variant designs that were unlikely to fold
into a similar structure, and these generally weren?t flagged as threats.

The research is all preliminary, and there are a lot of ways in which the
experiment diverges from reality. But I am not optimistic about this particular
arms race. I think that the ability of AI systems to create something deadly
will advance faster than the ability of AI systems to detect its components.

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Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democracy?

[2025.10.31] Listen to the Audio on NextBigIdeaClub.com

Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders share five key insights
from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics,
Government, and Citizenship.

What?s the big idea?

AI can be used both for and against the public interest within democracies. It
is already being used in the governing of nations around the world, and there is
no escaping its continued use in the future by leaders, policy makers, and legal
enforcers. How we wire AI into democracy today will determine if it becomes a
tool of oppression or empowerment.

1. AI?s global democratic impact is already profound.

It?s been just a few years since ChatGPT stormed into view and AI?s influence
has already permeated every democratic process in governments around the world:

In 2022, an artist collective in Denmark founded the world?s first political
party committed to an AI-generated policy platform. Also in 2022, South Korean
politicians running for the presidency were the first to use AI avatars to
communicate with voters en masse. In 2023, a Brazilian municipal legislator
passed the first enacted law written by AI.
In 2024, a U.S. federal court judge started using AI to interpret the plain
meaning of words in U.S. law.
Also in 2024, the Biden administration disclosed more than two thousand discrete
use cases for AI across the agencies of the U.S. federal government. The
examples illustrate the diverse uses of AI across citizenship, politics,
legislation, the judiciary, and executive administration.

Not all of these uses will create lasting change. Some of these will be
one-offs. Some are inherently small in scale. Some were publicity stunts. But
each use case speaks to a shifting balance of supply and demand that AI will
increasingly mediate.

Legislators need assistance drafting bills and have limited staff resources,
especially at the local and state level. Historically, they have looked to
lobbyists and interest groups for help. Increasingly, it?s just as easy for them
to use an AI tool.

2. The first places AI will be used are where there is the least public
oversight.

Many of the use cases for AI in governance and politics have vocal objectors.
Some make us uncomfortable, especially in the hands of authoritarians or
ideological extremists.

In some cases, politics will be a regulating force to prevent dangerous uses of
AI. Massachusetts has banned the use of AI face recognition in law enforcement
because of real concerns voiced by the public about their tendency to encode
systems of racial bias.

Some of the uses we think might be most impactful are unlikely to be adopted
fast because of legitimate concern about their potential to make mistakes,
introduce bias, or subvert human agency. AIs could be assistive tools for
citizens, acting as their voting proxies to help us weigh in on larger numbers
of more complex ballot initiatives, but we know that many will object to
anything that verges on AIs being given a vote.

But AI will continue to be rapidly adopted in some aspects of democracy,
regardless of how the public feels. People within democracies, even those in
government jobs, often have great independence. They don?t have to ask anyone if
it?s ok to use AI, and they will use it if they see that it benefits them. The
Brazilian city councilor who used AI to draft a bill did not ask for anyone?s
permission. The U.S. federal judge who used AI to help him interpret law did not
have to check with anyone first. And the Trump administration seems to be using
AI for everything from drafting tariff policies to writing public health reports
-- with some obvious drawbacks.

It?s likely that even the thousands of disclosed AI uses in government are only
the tip of the iceberg. These are just the applications that governments have
seen fit to share; the ones they think are the best vetted, most likely to
persist, or maybe the least controversial to disclose.

3. Elites and authoritarians will use AI to concentrate power.

Many Westerners point to China as a cautionary tale of how AI could empower
autocracy, but the reality is that AI provides structural advantages to
entrenched power in democratic governments, too. The nature of automation is
that it gives those at the top of a power structure more control over the
actions taken at its lower levels.

It?s famously hard for newly elected leaders to exert their will over the many
layers of human bureaucracies. The civil service is large, unwieldy, and messy.
But it?s trivial for an executive to change the parameters and instructions of
an AI model being used to

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