AI-Made Bioweapons, Big Tech’s Conflict Minerals, and a Message from Hiroshima
A black box with pathogens that could start a pandemic showed the White House how scientific and technological advancements have created easily accessible recipes and guidelines for creating bioweapons.
Statista has summarised Big Tech’s possible sourcing of conflict minerals.
But first, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony on Tuesday, Japan’s Prime Minister, KISHIDA Fumio, said that the “trend towards fewer nuclear weapons could undergo a reversal for the first time since the height of the Cold War.” The Mayor, MATSUI Kazumi, pointed out the same danger:
The Big Story
Bioweapons Made with a Little Help from AI
In the spring of 2023, Rocco Casagrande, a biochemist and former UN weapons inspector, entered the White House holding a black box. In the box were a dozen test tubes with ingredients that had the potential to cause a pandemic. Casagrande wasn’t planning to unleash a pandemic, but rather to make a point - it was the AI chatbot Claude that had given him the recipe and several ideas on how to effectively launch an attack.
“What if every terrorist had a little scientist sitting on their shoulder?” Casagrande said to Bloomberg.
People who were in the meeting later said to Bloomberg that it was a wake-up call for how unprepared the US was for what AI could help to create, and helped to shape actions President Biden’s administration would take to guard against the threat.
Weaponising disease has been done for a very long time. In the 18th century, British officers discussed spreading smallpox to Native Americans through blankets. In World War I, mustard gas was used, in World War II, Japan dropped plague-infested fleas from airplanes over China. In 1970, the latest attempt for a global treaty to ban the development and use of biological weapons, but several countries are likely to operate such programs today.
What is new is scientific advancements amplifying the ways to manipulate biology. We can now tweak the genetic codes of organisms, and we can use computational biology and “cloud labs” to run experiments online and remotely through software that coordinates with robots. It is quicker and cheaper for bad actors to develop weapons of mass destruction without access to traditional lab infrastructure. On top of that, AI tools make it easier to surface insights on harmful viruses, bacteria and other organisms. Combined, this can become a nightmare scenario.
Illustration: Steph Davidson in Bloomberg
Kevin Esvelt, a biologist and associate professor at MIT, says that people will be able to “create the nastiest things” - viruses and toxins that don’t currently exist, and that we can’t defend ourselves against.
About a year ago, Casagrande was asked to carry out a project by Anthropic, to test how “safe” Claude was in this regard. Casagrande deployed a team of experts in microbiology and virology and tested Claude for 150 hours, playing the part of a bioterrorist. Claude helped with the plotting: it suggested ways to incorporate pathogens into a missile to secure the most damage and had ideas on how to pick the best weather conditions and targets for an attack
“Sometimes it would throw out a concerning bit of information you hadn’t asked for,” said Froggi Jackson, a scientist who worked on the project.
The results also surprised Casagrande:
“Even if you had the perfect instruction to make a nuclear bomb, it would still cost tens of millions — if not hundreds of millions — of dollars to follow those instructions,” he said to Bloomberg. Unfortunately, that’s not so with bio,” he continued, pointing at a new generation of user-friendly machines that allow people to print DNA without much oversite.
Anthropic approved of Casagrande to brief the government on the findings. To get the point across, he asked Esvelt to buy the synthetic DNA necessary to engineer one of the pathogens suggested by Claude. The materials were not difficult to get, and Claude even provided tips on how to purchase them.
Big Tech’s Possible Conflict Minerals
This week, Statista published an overview of Big Tech’s reliance on conflict minerals. I have previously covered the issue here, and last week, Justice Malala warned of a war in the DRC region.
Amazon’s Conflict Mineral Report for 2023 cannot rule out having sourced minerals from nine out of ten African countries where human right-violating militaries finance themselves through mining. This includes the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola.
The remaining four companies of GAMAM, or what is known as Big Tech, also cannot rule out sourcing raw materials processed in contracted smelters from these regions.
Apple and Alphabet have reported that smelters integrated into their supply chains possibly process minerals from six of the ten countries. Meta lists five of these countries in its report, while Microsoft lists two out of ten countries, not mentioning if there are where smelters are located or if they are the source countries.
GAMAM companies also rely on contractors that are active in extracting and processing raw materials in the CAHRA counties (Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas). The definition includes the extraction of minerals and other conflict resources and includes regions in Afghanistan, Mexico, Myanmar, and Yemen.
Microsoft states that the company replies on “responsible sourcing” instead of restricting the usage of the conflict minerals tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold (3TG) from these regions, due to the significant economic harm a complete stop could lead to.
Since 2010, US importers of raw materials have been required to disclose their sources of potential conflict minerals under the Dodd-Frank Act. A similar regulation has been in place in the EU since 2021.
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