Secure DNA has recently released a preprint about an automated screening method to detect potentially hazardous DNA sequences. The main advance is to predict functional variants of hazardous sequences and also flag those variants as hazardous (instead of requiring an exact match). The authors tested their method by asking a “red team” to design bacteriophage sequences for screening.
This looks like a promising method that will be of interest to people in the biosecurity field.
Great to see the preprint! Kevin Esvelt also explains the approach in his EAG Boston 2023 talk (starting around 20min):