AI has become one of the buzziest of biotech buzzwords. Venture capital and public funding have flooded into companies using machine learning to speed the search for and manufacture of new drugs.
Now a team of researchers has raised alarms about the potential for this artificial-intelligence technology to be used for wrongdoing — most distressingly, to discover new, scarier chemical weapons.
Drug developers use AI to come up with thousands, even millions of molecules that might interact with specific biological targets. But the same software can also be used to try to identify poisonous gases or powders, the researchers found. Suddenly, the biotech field is worried — about both AI’s hidden dangers and the possibility of overhyping them.