The Editorial Board. (2025, December 11). Opinion | This is the 21st-Century arms race. Can America keep up? The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/09/opinion/editorials/us-china-military-ai-tech.html
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Something strange happened at the meeting between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping of China in a mansion south of San Francisco on Nov. 15, 2023. After a working lunch, as the two leaders rose to leave, an aide to Mr. Xi signaled to one of the Chinese president’s bodyguards, who approached the table, took a small bottle out of his pocket and quickly sprayed down every surface that Mr. Xi had touched, including what remained of the almond meringue cake on his dessert plate.
The purpose, the Americans concluded, was to remove any trace of Mr. Xi’s DNA that his hosts might collect and exploit. “This is the way they’re thinking,” said an official who attended the meeting, “that you could design a disease that would only affect one person.” …
This year two major companies — OpenAI and Anthropic — warned that if nothing is done, A.I. will soon be able to assist bad actors attempting to create bioweapons. Students at M.I.T. used chatbots to come up with four pandemic pathogens. The A.I. explained how to generate them from synthetic DNA; it suggested companies that were unlikely to screen orders for the DNA; and it recommended that if the students lacked the skills to do all this, they could contact a research organization. This was done in one hour.
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2nd part of a multi-part series
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