This is laughably misinformed. You can in fact build a bio weapon in a glorified shed if you know what you're doing. However it will be quite involved, requiring experience on the bench and a great deal of attention to small details. In short an LLM can't suddenly morph you into a molecular biology lab tech with 5+ years of experience.
Meanwhile as with any STEM discipline the educational process effectively serves as a screen for being a reasonably well adjusted adult.
> Further, even to build a chemical weapon, the compounds needed are strictly controlled almost in every country
You can synthesize from basic precursors but you will hit the same issue as above. You will need actual experience on the bench and the process of getting that is going to screen out the vast majority of would be bad actors. (Notably it failed to screen out the members of Aum Shinrikyo but that is very much the exception.)
This is pure ignorance and or thinking it can be done like shown in TV shows or movies. Any bio-weapon that is effective would be a virus/bacteria that is propagated via air particles like Antrax. That's not something you can build in a shed because without the safety precaution the person creating it would be the first victim of it.
I have relevant professional experience but do spout off.
> That's not something you can build in a shed
A negative pressure enclosure, filtration, and UVC sterilization can't be built in a shed? On what basis do you make this seemingly absurd claim? Go check out what hobbyist mushroom growers commonly get up to in their back yard.
BSL-3 is far from technically complex. It's just safety critical to an absurd degree thus (rightfully) mired in bureaucracy.
I think the claim in this report is that it was a state or semi-state actor. They were from "blocked regions" at a "military research institute." So dismissing the threat by solely modeling it as a disgruntled layman rando is not reasonable.
But you totally have to factor in the fact that anything coming out of Anthropic or OpenAI is part of a propaganda campaign to serve their business interests. These threats need to be addressed in ways that cause Anthropic and OpenAI pain (which means damaging their business). Because, FFS, anyone consciously racing to build doomsday devices needs a good, hard slap.
I mean there are services in which you can order things from wet labs so it's not completely hypothetical.
>Multiple IGSC member companies detected the ordered sequence and determined the order to be legitimate as defined in the 2023 guidance. Specifically, the orders were placed on behalf of SecureBio, an organization known to IGSC member companies given the role played by SecureBio in the SecureDNA project, an effort to build a DNA synthesis screening system. In addition, the name on the orders was an individual who has co-published multiple times with Esvelt, an individual well known to IGSC companies to work in viral evolution and who is known to have access to laboratory facilities sufficient to work safely with the ordered material.
>In short, the system worked as designed: a legitimate individual ordered DNA sequence that, by itself, posed no risk of misuse, for delivery to a company associated with legitimate scientific contributions directly relevant to the sequence that was ordered.
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/why-a-misleading-red-team-st...
It's worth verifying whether the US, OECD countries, UN, etc will have sufficient regulation over suspicious purchases, for example, after DOGE and funding cuts. This will be an ongoing issue as sovereign debts and bond yields squeeze out spending for other government regulation.