AI comes up with 40,000 toxic chemicals in 6 hours; scientists warn could be used to make biological weapons

Stealing artists' work, helping students cheat on tests and now this. Scientists have warned that Artificial Intelligence holds the potential to be misused to design highly toxic biological and chemical weapons.

Four researchers involved in AI-based drug discovery have warned that AI technology could be easily manipulated to come up with toxic nerve agents, which could then be used for biological or chemical warfare.

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The researchers were tasked by the Swiss Federal Institute for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection to see whether AI could be manipulated towards nefarious motives. They successfully generated not one or two but 40,000 potentially toxic drugs in just six hours.

Fabio Urbina, one of the researchers, and the lead author of a paper detailing these findings told 'The Verge' a technology magazine that all they had to do was 'flip the switch' and say "instead of going away from toxicity, what if we go towards toxicity?".

The findings have been shared in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

As per Urbina, the concern isn't that the AI came up with these "molecules, a lot of which look like chemical warfare agents,"but "how easy it was."

"A lot of the things we used are out there for free. You can download a toxicity dataset from anywhere," he added.

Reportedly, some of the AI-produced molecules were even "more toxic than VX" — a toxic nerve agent developed by the UK’s Defense Science and Technology Lab in the 1950s. VX is a toxic agent which kills its victims through muscle paralysis.

(With inputs from agencies)

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