The Evolving Global Biosecurity Landscape and the Role of AI
The global biosecurity landscape is evolving rapidly. Changing natural ecosystems, global travel and the potential misuse of AI require greater vigilance – but AI is also a critical tool in our response. We need breakthrough AI models and the scientific advances they enable to respond to these challenges and help make society more resilient to events such as future outbreaks.
Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs: A Unified Approach to Bioresilience
Today, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs share our common approach to bioresilience.
Our work is twofold: preventing threat actors from abusing our models, and ensuring that governments, scientists, biosecurity experts and our teams can use these technologies to build a more resilient world.
Over the past 12 months, we have built more than 15 partnerships with government agencies, biosecurity organizations and research groups to prevent threat actors from misusing our models, quickly detect new outbreaks, and respond quickly and effectively.
In Our Bioresilience Program
We believe society must leverage the advancing capabilities of AI to combat infectious diseases and prepare for future outbreaks.
Breakthroughs like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which mapped the 3D structures of almost all known proteins; Isomorphic Labs’ AI-powered Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE) provides the real-world accuracy needed to navigate novel biological systems with unprecedented precision. and AlphaGenome, which provides information about the function of the genome, radically shift the balance. Instead of just responding to natural outbreaks or security risks, we can now use these intelligent systems to help researchers develop proactive defenses, accelerate the discovery of therapeutics, and protect the global health ecosystem faster and more precisely.
With this in mind, we make our AI models and agents available to trusted partners to support progress in three key areas: prevention, detection and response. Here are some examples:
Impede
To ensure our models like Gemini are secure and useful to experts, we follow a four-step security process: threat modeling, assessments, mitigation and monitoring.
We work closely with in-house biologists, security experts and external partners to understand potential threats, test our models against them and build in robust protections.
Additionally, we are working to adapt our SynthID watermarking technology to biology, which could help DNA synthesis providers find potentially risky AI-generated biological sequences.
Recognize
We help make monitoring pathogens more cost-effective. For example, our agent AlphaEvolve can optimize algorithms used to create and analyze metagenomic sequencing data, helping to detect new outbreaks more quickly. This optimization enables faster and more accurate DNA analysis, making it more cost-effective to track diseases globally at scale.
We are also exploring how technologies such as AlphaGenome and Protein Function Annotation could be used to detect and characterize pathogens using sequence data, identifying new patterns and emerging threats faster than traditional methods.
Answer
Building on AlphaFold’s scientific impact, we give trusted researchers access to the latest AI systems from Google DeepMind to accelerate the development of vaccines and other countermeasures against known and novel threats.
To support government agencies and nonprofit organizations during novel outbreaks, Isomorphic Labs has established a specialized unit to rapidly deploy its drug design engine and develop medical countermeasures that can combat both naturally occurring pandemics and potential risks posed by the misuse of advanced AI. Collaborating with governments and global health authorities to advance a variety of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies enables the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine to achieve real-world impact on bioresilience.
This is a complex, long-term effort and part of our broader approach to addressing potential chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) risks, consistent with the proactive remediation measures and rigorous assessment protocols of our Frontier Safety Framework.
We are committed to working openly and collaboratively – with biosafety laboratories, governments and the broader scientific community – to ensure that AI is developed and used responsibly to help protect against one of society’s greatest risks.
For more information about our work and our call for new partnerships, read this full update on our approach. Here.
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