A call for biosecurity fieldbuilding

My name is Abbey, and I work at cG on the Capacity Building team. I’m posting to share an informal update about our excitement for biosecurity capacity building.

We’ve seen incredible progress in the field of technical AI safety and governance, and a lot of that is thanks to fieldbuilding programs.

We now think that on the margin, it’s likely that biosecurity is neglected relative to AI safety. AI progress will likely significantly increase the capability of a bad actor (including a rogue AI) to engineer dangerous pathogens, and we’d like to grow the number of people preparing defenses against that scenario.

Specifically, our Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team’s research suggests that there are four pillars of pathogen-agnostic defenses that can significantly reduce bio x-risk; and because these are defensive measures (with less dual-use potential), we want to broadly encourage people to work on them. Some projects, like red teaming, could involve infohazards that warrant more caution; you can check in with the BPP team if you want to do work like this or encourage it.

The measures are:

Personal protective equipment (‘PPE’)
Pervasive physical barriers and layers of sterilization (‘biohardening’)
Pathogen-agnostic early-warning systems (‘detection’)
Rapid, reactive medical countermeasures (‘MCMs’)

You can read more about them here, or listen to the 80k podcast discussion here.

The recommendation: More fieldbuilding on these four pillars and biosecurity in general

We’d be excited to see fieldbuilding organizations hosting talks, workshops and trainings, and research mentorship tracks on bio. Currently, there are a handful of AIxBio programs, like ERA’s (which are great!), but little material on the four pillars and no fieldbuilding programs exclusively dedicated to biosecurity. Bluedot’s Biosecurity course offers great resources as well – we’d love to amplify this material and strengthen the career pathways for getting into biosecurity.

Putting more focus on biosecurity could be especially impactful for organizations that:

Are looking to find a differentiated niche
Are based in a location that has a lot of bio or physical engineering talent (especially relative to software engineering / ML talent)
Are based in a location with more political influence and interest on biosecurity topics (especially relative to AI)

For example, it seems likely that European hubs like Berlin or Brussels would be excellent places to build up biosecurity programming. Boston and DC also have very vibrant biosecurity scenes – big shoutout to CBAI for taking steps to create a dedicated bio research mentorship program in Cambridge, MA.

For remote or full-time research mentorship programs, having a dedicated biosecurity program would create stronger network effects and institutional expertise about biosecurity. As a lower lift, we’re also excited for existing programs to add biosecurity as an additional track (like SPAR did earlier this year!)

If this sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to apply to our Capacity Building RFP!