AI designs new virus not found in nature

AxiosAugust 6, 2026en

A Stanford-led research team has used generative AI to design a synthetic virus — the first time artificial intelligence has been harnessed to create a organism that has never been seen in nature. Why it matters: What could go wrong? The big picture: It could be the first step toward the nightmare scenario AI experts have already warned about: deadly pathogens that can't be stopped, because they've been created too quickly for our current surveillance systems to stop them. The research could also lead to medical breakthroughs, which is the hope of the research team that conducted the study. "The ability of genome language models to generate entire functional genomes has not been tested," the

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