AI-ENABLED BIOWEAPONSGlobal Risk Index for AI-enabled Biological Tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the life sciences, accelerating breakthroughs in research, drug discovery and biotechnology. However, some of the AI tools that drive innovation can also be misused, posing significant dual-use risks.Ensuring that these technologies are developed and deployed responsibly requires a clear, structured understanding of the capabilities of individual AI-enabled biological tools and their potential misuse applications.

A RAND project introduced the first Global Risk Index for AI-enabled Biological Tools: a flexible framework designed to assess these tools based on their capabilities, potential for misuse, accessibility and technological maturity.

The Project’s team members were Toby Webster, a Senior Research Analyst at RAND; Sana Zakaria, Research Leader (Science and Emerging Technology, RAND Europe) and RAND Global Scholar; and Barbara Del Castello, an Associate Physical Scientist at RAND.

Developers can use the Index to better understand the broader implications of the tools they’re building – not just their benefits, but also their risks – and to design these, and other related AI models, with safety and responsibility in mind. Policymakers can use the Index to navigate a rapidly evolving landscape, identify misuse-relevant tools or capabilities, and prioritize areas for governance, risk assessment and mitigation.

We developed a method to identify and assess AI-enabled biological tools across eight diverse functional categories employed in the life sciences, using only publicly available information. From an initial pool of 1,107 tools identified through literature review, expert crowdsourcing, and targeted searches, we arrived at 57 state-of-the-art tools for detailed examination through our shortlisting method. Our analysis combined two main components:

A. Landscape assessment: this examines national origin, development trends, potential for change, and mapping to a biological weapons development risk chain (the last of which is not included in this public report); and

B. Tool assessment: this evaluates misuse-relevant capabilities against predefined scenarios – on a five-point scale from Very Low to Critical – and assesses each tool’s technological maturity and accessibility.

Each state-of-the-art tool was graded by two experts and received a composite score combining the misuse-relevant capability evaluation and maturity and availability assessment. Tools could be indexed as ‘Red’ (high priority requiring immediate attention), ‘Amber’ (moderate concern warranting case-by-case consideration), or ‘Green’ (lower priority for monitoring).