Source: Nature
The fixation on speculative AI-driven biological weapons is crowding out resources and policy attention from demonstrable biosecurity gaps. The same vulnerabilities that enabled the 2001 anthrax attacks remain largely unpatched a quarter-century later. Regulatory and funding bodies are chasing tomorrow's theoretical risks while today's practical attack surface goes under-resourced. Threat inflation on frontier risks has historically weakened institutional capacity to address known problems, and in biosecurity, the cost of misaligned priorities is measured in lives.