When I’m warning about the extinction risk that artificial superintelligence (ASI) poses to humanity, one question people often ask is: “But how could ASI possibly harm us if it’s sitting in a data center and we’re out here in the real world?”
One possible answer to that is, for example, that the ASI could create a supervirus that triggers a deadly pandemic. And, of course, a curious person might then ask, “But how would the ASI even gain access to a lab where viruses can be cultivated?”
Anthropic has now provided the answer. As Reuters reports, Anthropic has recently set up a so-called “wet lab” in the Bay Area without making a big public announcement. A wet lab is the type of laboratory facility primarily used to conduct experiments with biologically active components.
Reuters, which also cites two anonymous insider sources, speculates that Anthropic is expanding in this area so quickly because it fears losing public trust in AI before it can demonstrate success in tackling life-threatening diseases.
“To operate at the largest possible scale,” Anthropic also plans to use AI directly in this wet lab to conduct experiments. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, is quoted as saying:
We’re in the very early innings of using AI to automate the execution of lab work, an area that has the potential to bring about meaningful acceleration in so many different processes.
I’m not sure that a wet lab of all places is the right setting to “accelerate many processes” through AI automation. Anthropic is already barely keeping up with having humans reliably monitor what all the many AI agents it deploys internally are actually doing. Do we really want to have AI monitored by other AI in a biomedical wet lab, just to speed up processes?
Especially since we don’t really know exactly what Anthropic is actually doing in these labs. Reuters assumed it involved research to find new drugs, but that seems to be at least not the only use:
A spokesperson later clarified that Anthropic’s lab is not specifically for drug discovery, declining to elaborate.
I don’t know about you, but I think that if you take the risk of automating your biomedical wet lab work with AI, you shouldn’t have the right to refuse to elaborate when the public wants to know what you’re actually doing there.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.