Anthropic, the company responsible for the AI assistant "Claude," has aborted at least five scientific research projects potentially linked to the development of biological weapons so far this year, several of them with a high pandemic risk.
This is noted in the report "Detecting and Combating the Misuse of AI," released this Thursday, which details that, at a minimum, four of these episodes were related to state entities. Anthropic has chosen not to identify these institutions, considering it possible that they were strictly academic works.
In the first of the described cases, the research proposal was presented as a funding request for R&D activities aimed at making the chikungunya virus more transmissible and resistant to the human immune system.
"The grant aimed to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, transform them into infectious clones, and select the most virulent ones 'in vivo.' In other words, the virus would progressively become more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, and the researchers would retain the most pathogenic variants in each iteration," the document summarized.
The company emphasizes that this type of knowledge could be used to develop vaccines or therapies. However, the fact that the aid form specified that the researchers would be civilians, but that the results would be replicated in a military laboratory, led Anthropic to cancel that account's access to Claude.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), chikungunya is a mosquito-borne infection that causes fever and "debilitating" pain in the joints, which usually subsides after a few days, although it can last for months or even years.
On the other hand, Anthropic has detected an attempt by a state entity to use its AI models to analyze non-transmissible poisons between people. It also ended up banning another user who was studying bacterial toxins and proteins associated with viral hemorrhagic fevers with pandemic potential, such as Ebola.
The American tech firm has also identified similar usage requests, although with objectives considered less concerning, related to the smallpox virus and research on the adaptation of avian influenza to mammals.