It hasn’t gotten there yet, but it has now created a new, viable virus not found in nature—which is one of those technical achievements that is both impressive and unnerving. According to the researchers, who detailed the experiment in a study published Thursday in Science, the bacteria produced viruses capable of infecting other bacteria and spreading. The first is that the process of synthesizing viruses existed long before AI showed up on the scene, so part of this experiment is just an existing tool in the toolkit of viral researchers. That’s by design, as the DNA the AI model was pulling from was a relatively harmless virus known as Phi X-174. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”