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If you’re willing to entertain the views outlined above, then it’s not very hard to argue that AI could be a risk to our safety and security. There are two common sense reasons to be concerned. First, it may be tricky to build safe, reliable, and steerable systems when those systems are starting to become as intelligent and as aware of their surroundings as their designers. To use an analogy, it is easy for a chess grandmaster to detect bad moves in a novice but very hard for a novice to detect bad moves in a grandmaster. If we build an AI system that’s significantly more competent than human

We worry about how AI might assist malicious actors with weapon acquisition and development both because of how it is similar to historical information and communication technologies and how it is different. In recent years, terrorist groups have rapidly adopted technologies like encrypted communications, cryptocurrency, and social media. We should expect nothing different from AI. Just as those seeking information about how to build weapons shifted from needing to acquire physical pamphlets or manuals to searching the internet, we can expect that they will query AI. What is different, though,

Within the realm of threat actors seeking assistance from AI, biological risks—and catastrophic risks more generally—are by no means the only concern. In fact, we invest considerable resources in researching the potential implications of AI for cybersecurity and gathering intelligence about actual uses of our platforms by those who would cause harm through fraud, malware development, and influence operations, among other areas. Nevertheless, at least two factors make biorisk especially concerning. First, the potential consequences of a successful biological attack are unusually severe. The eff