this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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An article on the subject.
FTA: "In responding to the invitation, Sean Ekins, Collaborations’ chief executive, began to brainstorm with Fabio Urbina, a senior scientist at the company. It did not take long for them to come up with an idea: What if, instead of using animal toxicology data to avoid dangerous side effects for a drug, Collaborations put its AI-based MegaSyn software to work generating a compendium of toxic molecules that were similar to VX, a notorious nerve agent?
The team ran MegaSyn overnight and came up with 40,000 substances, including not only VX but other known chemical weapons, as well as many completely new potentially toxic substances. All it took was a bit of programming, open-source data, a 2015 Mac computer and less than six hours of machine time. “It just felt a little surreal,” Urbina says, remarking on how the software’s output was similar to the company’s commercial drug-development process. “It wasn’t any different from something we had done before—use these generative models to generate hopeful new drugs.”"
So it generated known chemical weapons as well as previously unknown compositions that to all appearances would be effective chemical weapons. They didn't actually test them for obvious reasons, but their animal toxicology models made pretty clear they would be effective toxic chemical compositions that could easily be weaponized and it did it in six hours.