US Senators Fear Potential Use Of Artificial Intelligence For Biological Attacks

Senator Richard Blumenthal, from the US Democratic Party, is concerned about AI security. (photo: @SenBlumenthal)

JAKARTA - Both Democratic and Republican senators expressed concern on Tuesday, July 25 about the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI) for malicious purposes, particularly regarding the possibility of AI being used to create biological attacks.

In a hearing before the Senate Judicial Committee subcommittee, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of an AI company called Anthropic, said that AI could help bad actors who previously did not have special skills to develop biological weapons.

"The term biological weapons production measures involve knowledge that cannot be found in Google or in textbooks and requires a high level of expertise," said Amedoi, whose company is working closely with biosecurity experts in a study of the biological risks arising from AI. "We found that current AI tools can complement these steps."

Amodei stated that AI has not been able to help build biological weapons, and calls them a "middle-term" risk.

"By allowing more perpetrators to launch large-scale biological attacks, we believe that this is a serious threat to US national security," he added.

The head of the subcommittee, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, expressed his concern.

"The experts who built these systems warn about human extinction," he said in his opening remarks. "The purpose of this hearing is to prepare the basis for legislation. To move from general principles, to specific recommendations. Using this hearing to make laws."

Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, called for a security mechanism "which will ensure that this new technology is truly beneficial to the American people."

This hearing comes days after AI companies including OpenAI, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms made a voluntary commitment to the White House last week to implement measures such as giving watermarking to AI-generated content to improve technology security.

Since generative artificial intelligence, which uses data to create new content such as human writing that sounds natural like ChatGPT, was in the spotlight earlier this year, policymakers around the world are starting to consider ways to reduce the dangers of this new technology to national and economic security.