The Next Bioweapon Could Attack Our Genes Instead of Our Bodies. I Promise You We’re Not Ready for That.

5 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:The confluence of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence is lowering the technical barrier for bioterrorism, according to some experts. Developing a weapon capable of attacking the human genome remains technically challenging—especially devising the means to do widespread damageThe next threat may be mutagenic, teratogenic, or something else entirely, and the world is likely entering a new era of heightened vigilance against biological weapons.We live in an age of seemingly unending crises. The world continues to warm, pushing Earth into the sixth mass extinction event in its history. Intractable wars and conflicts rage on multiple continents. The U.S. life expectancy is now at the lowest it’s been in 30 years. Then, there’s artificial intelligence, a massive uncertainty bomb with the equal possibility to help solve—or exacerbate—all of the above.Nowhere is this more obvious than in the biomedical field, where AI’s ability to pore over massive data sets, recognize patterns, and design novel viruses and bacteriophages is already reshaping research. This is only the beginning of what scientists call “synthetic biology,” and like so many human breakthroughs, it could be critical to tackling medical crises, such as the rise of antimicrobial-resistant superbugs. But those tools could just as easily fuel a new age of bioweapons, a threat serious enough that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called for a slowdown of AI development.Arms control experts have warned for decades about weapons that attack the human genome instead of the human body. And unfortunately, those warnings aren’t hypothetical, since cruder chemical versions have already been used in warfare. Between 1962 and 1971, U.S. aircraft sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of herbicide across Vietnam. Much of it was Agent Orange, tainted during manufacture with TCDD—the most toxic dioxin ever identified, and a known human carcinogen. It causes birth defects and abnormalities in developing embryos.Of course, Vietnam wasn’t the only theater of war where weapons were used that caused prolonged medical issues, whether cancer or reproductive problems. In the early 1980s, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the USSR of using Trichothecene mycotoxins (a known teratogen), otherwise known as “yellow rain,” in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. In 1995, Saddam Hussein’s regime admitted to the U.N. that Iraq had developed aflatoxins—chemicals produced by the fungi Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus—for use in aerial bombs and Scud missile warheads. The toxin wasn’t meant to kill troops. Instead, its main method of destruction is an insidious one: It causes the rapid development of liver cancer, particularly in children.“From a moral standpoint, aflatoxin is the cruelest weapon,” Richard Spertzel, the chief weapons inspector for the now-defunct United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) told Slate in 2002. “It means watching children die slowly of liver cancer.”These fears are only exacerbated today by gene editing technologies and artificial intelligence. In February 2016, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, added gene-editing to a list of “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation,” and a year later, China’s People’s Liberation Army noted in an authoritative textbook that “specific ethnic genetic attacks” could become increasingly possible. In 2024, the Washington Post reported that Russia was expanding an old bioweapons lab in the midst of its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.Of course, many international legal frameworks, such as the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, have been created to prevent such an attack from happening in the first place. But with the proliferation of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, it’s possible such an attack could one day originate from a rogue actor. In other words, what if Amodei’s worst nightmare came to pass?Here’s how I think it could go down.In the event of such an attack, one of the keys to an effective first response would be to figure out precisely what had happened, like when Bashar al-Assad used Sarin gas in 2013. In less than a month, investigators for the U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) noted that the evidence was “overwhelming and indisputable” after 85 percent of blood samples from the impacted region in Syria contained traces of the sarin gas, along with retrieved rocket fragments. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have a playbook in place for a bioterrorist threat as well, which includes coordinating with the Emergency Operations Center along with health officials and hospitals located at ground zero.The state-sponsored use of such a weapon would certainly make that country a pariah in the eyes of the U.N., though shifting global alliances can complicate matters. In Syria, for example, the U.S. and Europe cut off diplomatic ties, leveraged heavy sanctions, and even launched military strikes (which also happened following the 2017 sarin gas attacks in Syria). On the ground, scientists would have to vigorously study the mutagenic weapon, learn its impacts, and plot an appropriate course of action to stop its spread. They’d also have to provide short-term and long-term treatment for the people affected by the weapon.Depending on how devastating the weapon was, entire research foundations might form to track long-term impacts of the exposure, similar to the creation of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) that studied the lifelong impacts of radiation exposure following the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. As also seen in the decades following the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, science often follows the political maxim of “never letting a good crisis go to waste” when potentially life-saving knowledge can be obtained.Thankfully, here’s where some good news comes in. A 2018 report developed by scientists and experts around the U.S. titled Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology highlights that developing such a weapon is prohibitively difficult. Even in the age of AI, when the technical expertise to make bioweapons is more readily available, the mechanism for deploying a weapon that would have a wide impact remains technically challenging.“Even were it to become more technologically feasible to use genes to cause oncogenesis, neurodegenerative disease, immunological collapse, or other undesirable states, in the absence of a pathogen or greatly advanced unnatural horizontal transfer mechanism to promote the dispersal of a gene, the ability of an actor to deliver genes for these purposes is limited...The mechanisms of dispersal (other than pathogens themselves) are likely to be low yield, the probability of inculcation of the disease state is likely to be low, and the onset of the disease state is likely not rapid.”But that doesn’t mean the world can turn a blind eye to this growing threat.A 2025 report by the Center of Strategic and International Studies says that the “falling barriers to bioterrorism are set to accelerate in the emerging age of AI and biotechnology” and that “U.S. biosecurity measures are ill-equipped to prevent AI-enabled biological threats.” The report goes on to suggest that, at least in the U.S., more funding needs to flow to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) while supporting international AI safety efforts, such as the International Network of AI Safety Institutes.The future of bioterrorism in the age of AI is another line item on the world’s growing list of uncertainty. But that doesn’t mean we can’t—and shouldn’t—prepare for the very worst outcomes.Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.