By Sascha Brodsky

Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot helped a scientist plan potentially risky bird flu experiments.

The bird flu research was one of five instances in Anthropic’s report involving uses of Claude that the company says could support biological weapons development. None of the five look technically sophisticated or particularly concerning to biologist Kevin Esvelt of the MIT Media Lab. Esvelt is more suspicious of the researchers’ motives; he says the five cases showed signs of ill intent. But none “represented a competent attempt at weaponization.”

The poor quality of these particular attempts does not show what a more capable user might be able to do with AI-assisted biology, Esvelt says. AI can help with research and analysis, but turning an idea into a biological threat takes additional work, Koblentz says. “Even if AI is used to design a potentially dangerous pathogen, it is not a threat until the organism can be modified in a lab or synthesized.”