The development is a hopeful step toward medical advances, but it also raises concerns around the potential for misuse. Of the thousands of genomes that the AI generated, scientists built and tested about 300 in the lab and found that 16 were viable viruses. It’s a notable scientific milestone, especially as scientists race to combat rising drug resistance within germs such as E. coli. “The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not,” they wrote. “It is difficult to imagine these models automatically generating viable genomes ‘out-of-the-box,’” he said.