Doesn't this simply amount to disagreeing about what counts as "meaningful" from a bio-safety POV? Also, even the ASL-3 deployment safeguards for Opus 4 and higher were always adopted as a mere matter of caution; it's not clear that even Anthropic believed at any point that this reflected any genuine "threshold crossing" event. So it's just not obvious how much weight we're supposed to place on that particular stance.
But I don't think I've found any domain expert who thinks granting everyone raw access to the most capable models wouldn't meaningfully increase risk. OpenAI recently staffed a biological threat modeler to help quantify this risk.
(Edit: just saw your edit, this includes at Anthropic. ASL tiers were "rule-out" to exclude rather than "rule-in", so exact thresholds were murkier, but I think it's clear that models have passed that threshold by now.)
That said, there are clear steps and requirements to set up a BSL-2 or BSL-3 lab, and I think there should be similarly clear rules around model capabilties and access. The process for Anthropic and OpenAI is murky and still implictly gated on spend, which I think is holding back research.
For example, anyone who has access to a BSL-3 lab should have a clear and low-cost path to a model with corresponding capabilities, as long as they set up corresponding precautions for model access.
I think it would be a bad outcome for only frontier labs and a select few groups they choose to have access to the most capable models – which is sadly the precedent that's currently being set.
It depends how capable these raw models are. Biology as a field depends most on real-world knowledge, which is an expensive capability for open models that are targeting widespread deployment. It's quite plausible that even Opus 4 would be a lot more capable in these domains than the best universally accessible "raw models" today, quite unlike other domains such as coding or theoretical math. The securebio.org benchmark has spotty representation of openly available models, but it does show Kimi 2.5 being no more capable than GPT 5 mini, which is a plausible summary of where things may stand today.
And sure, and I love open models – I spent much of the past couple months doing additional RL on Qwen 3.6 35B A3B, Gemma 4, Kimi K2.6, and GLM 5.1. Without these open models, I'd be forced to do my research inside a frontier lab.
There's a balance to strike here, but I don't think the biological risk is overplayed. It would be very easy to accidentally cross the threshold of "meaningful" without adequate safeguards, and then be unable to undo what you've released to the world.