For the first time, AI has designed complete viruses from scratch. Stanford researchers used an AI trained on DNA instead of text and asked it to write entire virus genomes. They tested around 300 designs in the lab. 16 came out as real, working viruses that killed bacteria. These are bacteriophages, they infect bacteria only and cannot infect humans. The AI was also trained without any human viruses in its data. The point is medical. Antibiotic resistance killed 1.27 million people in 2019, and these AI viruses beat bacteria that had already resisted the natural version. But biosecurity experts at Johns Hopkins warned in the same journal that the ability to write viral genomes with AI now exists, and the rules to control it do not. Source: “Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models,” published in Science, August 6, 2026 Follow chatgptricks for the biggest AI stories every day. #ai #science #biotech #tech