AI-powered biowarfare is coming; the Army lays plans to ‘fight through’ it

FORT BELVOIR, Va.— AI is “dramatically lowering the barrier” to creating biological weapons, according to the Army’s updated biodefense strategy—even as it gives commanders and troops a better picture of how biological threats, both natural and manmade, will shape future battlefields, service officials say.

The new strategy aims to prepare the Army to “deploy, fight, and win decisively in a bio-contested environment” by 2035, via new training, advanced early warning, and hardened equipment. But its leaders and bio-threat experts are already working to overhaul how the service thinks about and responds to biological threats. AI will be central to this new era of biodefense, whether advising in the disposition of forces or countering enemy attempts to sow confusion and panic about outbreaks, according to officials who spoke to reporters Tuesday.

The era of AI bioweapons

In 2023, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told U.S. lawmakers that AI could “widen the range of actors with the technical capability to conduct a large-scale biological attack,” a scenario he said could come to pass within “two to three years.”

The scenario is drawing nearer. This week, a new paper out of Stanford described how feeding genetic data into high-performance AI models could lead to a new kind of virus that can infect bacteria, showing it’s ability to breakthrough the immunity barriers of other organisms.

This has alarmed RAND molecular biologist Steph Guerra, who wrote, “As AI capabilities advance, viral bioweapons could become much easier to design and produce and could cause even more harm than the weapons used in the past.”

But AI also play a role in defending societies and militaries from such weapons. “We know that everything is changing faster now and so part of the key to the strategy is making sure that we’re adaptable,” Alison Tamasi, the chief of the survivability and effects division at the Army’s Nuclear and CWMD Agency, said Tuesday.

Just as detecting a needle in a haystack is harder than making needles, using AI to detect biological threats on the battlefield is more complicated and human-centered task than feeding data into a model. That’s one reason why the updated Army biodefense strategy is so important, the researchers said. 

One key element is new, portable genetic-sequencing kits. No bigger than a computer printer, the kits can analyze genetic samples on a laptop computer not connected to the cloud. That might sound like the sort of thing you could encounter in a doctor’s office. But a cheek swab that a doctor might take in a relatively clean conditions is very different from samples contaminated with dust, air, fiber, or animal tissue. And getting analysis in the field in a day or so beats waiting weeks for a sample transported back to the States.

The Army hopes the kits, which can classify a sample as a known biothreat or a new one, will help forge strategies when new ones arise.

You can’t stop biology. You can plan for it.

AI isn’t the only factor increasing risks of future biological threats. New viruses occur naturally and spread more quickly today as a function of globalization. But the military’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic “exposed shortfalls in Army biodefense capabilities,” according to the new strategy.

A 2023 study found that COVID-19, which thrust the military into new civilian support roles and imposed new guidelines on forces around the world, undermined team cohesion, military readiness, and of course, mental and physical health. 

The new strategy emphasizes better planning for operating during a pandemic, manmade or not. Demonstrating this capability might just deter an adversary from attempting to launch a bioattack as part of a larger campaign, officials said.

“The challenge is going to be how we do this [sample collection, analysis] in the crisis phase, or worse, in the conflict phase,” said Col. Dennis Ruffolo, deputy director for force health protection at the Office of the Surgeon General and Army Medical Command. “That’s really what this is going to get after is is is making sure all Army leaders understand that we have to learn ways to fight through the biothreats.”

Here, too, AI will play a key role, said Ruffolo, in helping commanders better understand the biothreats they face, or even will face, in as much detail as possible. 

That sort of understanding, enabled not just by new AI models but also humans collecting samples, monitoring environments, and performing analysis, will better prepare the Army for those contingencies. That adaptation means getting more soldiers to understand that bio-threat monitoring is a new priority, ensuring they are capable of biological threat monitoring, and providing them with the equipment and training to do so.

“I have operators below me who do not have doctorates or [are] not microbiologists, I have E-4 specialists who are able to operate that technology with protocols that I have written, and they can do that unsupervised.” said Army microbiologist Amina Zeidan, with the 44th Medical Brigade.

The strategy makes those sorts of efforts a core priority across training, equipping, facilities, policy, and so forth.

“Historically, the Army treated biodefense as a specialized problem,” reads the strategy. “Victory in future conflicts requires an Army that treats biodefense not as a secondary concern, but as a core warfighting imperative. This strategy provides the roadmap.”