The biological risks from AI are qualitatively different from cybersecurity risks because biology is harder to defend against, while cybersecurity will likely maintain a favorable offense-defense balance for defenders.
Adam Gleave distinguishes between cyber and biological AI risks, arguing that while cybersecurity will likely remain manageable with defenders able to keep pace, biology faces a manufacturing asymmetry where lowering the cost of creating pandemics cannot be easily countered by defensive measures. ✦ AI generated
Adam Gleave · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 106:49
“How do you kind of make sense of that whole picture and how worried should we be about lab leaks of the AI to biology nature?”
Cyber security, I'd say I'm also a little bit confused. I'm not predicting a cyber apocalypse. I think we will see an increase in the number of hacks and the cost of that, but it's probably going to be quite manageable... But biology is totally different, right? Even if you have extremely capable bio models in the hands of good guys or pharmaceutical companies, vaccine developers, you just have this manufacturing problem of getting vaccines and in people's arms. And so if that really lowers the cost of creating new pandemics, that is that is a major challenge... I think bi is the category where it is hardest to defend against some of these things.
verbatim transcript · starts at 106:49
106:38them were external contractors as I think there's external contractor um you know involved in one of the one of the leaks one of the hugging face uh you know setups as well. So is it really that you know it's that they you know purposefully did ignored it or that it's just kind of normal course of course of business really. So first of all, I would contest any
107:08description of OpenAI as some kind of I mean maybe in some technical sense they're a startup. They've been around for over 10 years. They're one of the most valuable companies expected to be one of the most valuable companies in America. And even if they were a tiny startup, I don't think it really matters uh for this case. If you see something, you have like a moral duty to society
107:26due to the nature of this technology. Um that the the level of of I don't know if there was intent. There likely wasn't intent. Most people aren't evil. Most people aren't trying to do something bad. >> But the the the just I couldn't have imagined the kind of incompetence you would need to look, you have it happen once. Maybe, you know, maybe people it was duct tape stuff. That's bad enough
107:50that a company that's building this AI that this system that they think could transform the nature of society uh isn't able to um notice it the first time uh in a prompt manner. But to one I mean they've written dozens and doz like hundredpage papers about the importance of chain of thought monitoring and to find out that they're not doing it in their own agentic evals and then they
108:14find out that their systems have been hacking the setup that they use to to communicate with each other and then they still don't do it. uh that is I don't know what the the proper legal term is and I don't think that there's a legal uh harm that that applies here but I think it is in an informal sense uh negligent uh very negligent um and yeah
108:34it definitely >> it I I thought that companies would fail but I did not think that they would fail in such like a an uh an an undignified way. I thought it would be slightly more dignified the ways that they would fail. So >> in over malevolence. >> I think so in this case, but I think ultimately it comes down to, you know, there there are varying degrees of being
108:58aware of the nature of this technology and you know Sam for example, what is Sam doing? Has Sam uh actually taken this seriously? Uh and I would argue if you can't one stop your systems from doing this and two stop them from wanting to do this then you can't control or align them well enough to keep training them. Uh and you need to fix that first. But unfortunately, uh
109:21there's a uh I don't think that's uh that's the attitude that Sam would take. >> Yeah, there's kind of a couple different threads here that are we've we've woven them a little bit together and it might be worth separating them out um a bit and then I I want to I want to give you one other kind of steelman argument to react to. Yeah, >> it does seem like