I'd wager it's likely easier for an average person to do this with Tor browser than it is to get an LLM to help them with it. Even ones that Dario calls dangerous.
Basic safeguards are all that's required, and they've been there in every usable model since GPT-2, including Chinese models that are supposedly "unsafe".
Or are we saying that some lunatics will start training their own models, spin up a GPU cluster, run some abliteration workflow, or learn how to jailbreak?
That would be a very dedicated person. And dedicated person doesn't need an LLM. So where are they?
Am I saying that guardrails don't work? No, they probably stop a lot of insane people trying insane things. But you don't need Fable-level guardrails to do that. You probably don't even need to do anything during pretraining, or RL, or classification to make sure model refuses to compy with "hack me a bank" or "make me a chemical weapon".
All models will automatically have guardrails just as a result of training on data that gives them intelligence. You have to actually train it to be malicious to produce something what Dario calls "insufficient guardrails".
No guardrail is going to stop a determined person with sufficient intelligence. It only has to stop ones with insufficient one, and even basic guardrail that are just by-product of training is going to achieve that.
Except Bioweapons already existed before LLMs, Adversarial governments already have them, they are already easy to make. You could use the same bullshit argument for why we need to ban libraries, books, or require a license to buy an internet connection.
Not going to go into it but I studied biology. It’s all out there. It’s easier than you think.
It hasn’t happened yet because… nobody has done it. That’s the answer. There is no policeable physics based barrier like there is with nukes and fissile material. Biology is scarier than nukes. One attack could have a much larger body count than even a big H-bomb.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder about quantum immortality, the idea that we are just in the timeline where we exist.
> Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry with a minor in pharmacology
Watching him explain things has made me realize that knowing how to manufacture a very dangerous thing probably requires attending some classes and knowing how to read a paper. And the way he just casually orders dangerous materials makes me feel like there are just online stores with 2-day shipping after you upload your ID or something.
It also made me think that lack of specialized education would get me nowhere if I wanted to replicate whatever he's doing, even if an LLM guided me step-by-step, because I'd probably do something stupid (or AI would miss a crucial instruction/hallucinate) and kill myself first.
So my opinion on this is that people who could pose any danger were already posing it before LLMs and LLMs won't materially change that.
As for cyberweapons, there is no way to secure a system than to actually design it securely.
[note - There has been supply chain surveillance since Project Bacchus, at the very least.]
I've read the front matter and the Misuse report.
You don't have to take my word for it. Read for yourself what inspired the NYT headline "Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons."
Let's dig into, "Case study 2: A research program engineering highly pathogenic mammal-adapted avian influenza"
Sounds serious. But what were they using Claude for?
> a researcher outside the US using Claude in their research on highly-pathogenic avian influenza (“bird flu”). The research focused on viruses’ adaptation to mammals, and the mechanism by which it causes severe disease beyond the respiratory tract. [..] The researcher in question accessed Claude from an unsupported region via US virtual private server infrastructure, using a privacy-email provider with an auto-generated username. The researcher pursued this work in a credible institutional context, and interacted with Claude over the course of several weeks, exchanging thousands of messages. In these exchanges, the researcher leveraged Claude’s knowledge of the scientific literature to assist the researcher in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments. The researcher also used Claude for editorial assistance in writing up the research.
and "editorial assistance in writing up the research."
and then,
> Importantly, because our biological safety classifiers robustly block content involving high-risk biological research (in this case, the construction of enhanced pandemic potential pathogens), all of these exchanges occurred on models in our weakest class of models (specifically, the models were Claude Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, the latter of which the user began using after Sonnet 4 was deprecated). Upon a detailed examination of the exchanges, we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design. This is consistent with our understanding of the capabilities of Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, which are not able to perform expert-level biology research tasks; we estimate that the uplift provided to the researcher was limited and substantially lower than it would have been from one of our more capable models.
The report mentions "uplift" here. They're talking about a domain expert in a state research institution using Claude to do paperwork.
The front matter then says,
> Nonetheless, based on these exchanges, this case provides evidence of the existence of active wet-lab research programs that develop both the knowhow and the biological materials needed to create pathogens of enhanced pandemic potential
Working scientists.
From a different case study. this one was called, "Case study 3: Covert frontier model access for orthopoxvirus research"
> In May 2026, our biological safety classifier blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application for scientific funding. The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research (that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property) on the chikungunya virus. This gain of function research was aimed at the virus’ transmissibility and immune evasion properties.
"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"
> Chikungunya virus is a mosquito-borne virus that causes debilitating symptoms (such as severe pain and fever) that can last for weeks or months, and has no licensed therapeutic. And because chikungunya circulates naturally, a deliberate release (as part of a bioweapon) would be difficult to distinguish from a natural outbreak. The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo. In other words, the virus would become progressively more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, with researchers keeping the most disease-causing variants in each round. Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics for the virus—but it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous.
Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"
It was most likely vaccine development. They stopped the study of a neglected tropical disease and vaccine development.
But we can't be sure, because,
> One of the reasons we were inclined to think this research was less innocuous was that the institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern. Although information within the application suggested that the research was pursued by civilian researchers, it was intended to be performed at a military research institute.
In most parts of the world, there's either strict military control over BSL-4 labs, or a mixed military-civilian hybrid model.
I doubt that researchers working in the military side of these labs looking to weaponize things are writing grants with Claude.
I really want to be charitable here, but in general, it seems that they stopped people writing grants and reports for vaccine and therapeutics research and are claiming it as "possible efforts to build biological weapons."
The one case where Claude was used to do something interesting and were stopped is fairly upsetting to read, at least for me.
> In our fourth case study, a researcher used Claude to develop an atlas of venom toxin peptides from multiple venomous animal lineages. They then further developed this into a generative pipeline that optimized toxin characteristics. The program had an explicit therapeutic goal: the development of new analgesics (pain killers), antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules. However, the atlas contained scaffolds for both analgesic and paralytic targets: it could, therefore, be used to generate both novel therapeutic or harmful compounds. The latter are derived from toxins that are export-controlled under the Australia Group common control list due to their dual-use potential as incapacitating agents. The researchers themselves showed awareness of the dual-use nature of their work, citing journal articles that referred to the dual-use nature of protein design. Moreover, international compliance assessments for this location raise concerns about the specific class of toxins that the researcher pursued and specifically the use of AI/ML for bioweapons applications in the context of this class of toxins. In this case, we learned from information shared with Claude that the researcher’s outputs also were part of a state-supported research program. This account was banned in May 2026 for unsupported region evasion.
Anthropic says so itself,
"The program had an explicit therapeutic goal: the development of new analgesics (pain killers), antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules"
and that it was a "[..]state-supported research program"
Who exactly is using venom from snakes as a weapon when... nerve agents like sarin, VX, novichok etc exist and can get the job done for less fuss and muss?
They stopped the development of new painkillers and antidepressants.
Are you feeling safer knowing that researchers can't use Claude to write grants and progress reports? Or make new painkillers?
Again, trying really hard to be charitable here. Because from what I remember, one of the motivations behind the founding of OpenAI and Anthropic was ending disease.
This seems to be anything but.