Exclusive: Google bets that AI can stop bioweapons
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Google DeepMind on Thursday unveiled a new bioresilience program designed to help governments and researchers prevent, detect and respond to biological threats.
Why it matters: Google is betting the same frontier AI models that could create new biological risks can also help prevent them.
The big picture: DeepMind's announcement comes days after DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Axios that governments should establish a standards body for frontier AI, underscoring the company's push for AI guardrails.
State of play: The bioresilience initiative — launched alongside Google's Isomorphic Labs — aims to to improve pathogen surveillance, accelerate vaccine and therapeutic design and strengthen outbreak responses.
- The company says it has built more than 15 partnerships over the past year with governments, biosecurity organizations and researchers.
- Google is also expanding access to its AI models and agents for trusted researchers, governments and biosecurity partners. Under its safety framework, those are considered "low-risk" restricted releases rather than public deployments.
Zoom in: "If... we were to find that we were reaching a critical capability level and we didn't have the appropriate mitigations, then we would not be launching," Helen King, Google DeepMind's vice president of responsibility told Axios.
- She said that threshold has not yet been reached, citing evaluations Google runs throughout development.
What they're saying: "Everyone agrees we can't get this wrong," King said of AI's biological capabilities.
- Frontier AI labs are "in agreement" on the need for rigorous testing before model releases, Owen Larter, Google DeepMind's senior director of frontier AI policy and global affairs, told Axios.
Zoom out: The biosecurity effort aligns with the governance framework Hassabis proposed earlier this week.
- In an exclusive interview with Axios, Hassabis called for a more "systematic" approach to AI regulation — funded by the industry, staffed by technical experts, and answerable to the U.S. government.
- Larter said he's hopeful the Trump administration's executive order process will produce a "durable framework" for testing frontier AI models before deployment.
Catch up quick: Google has become one of AI's biggest players in biology.
- AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures and helps scientists understand diseases and develop new drugs, earned Hassabis a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- Isomorphic Labs is now commercializing that AI expertise for drug discovery.
The bottom line: Rather than framing biology solely as an AI safety problem, Google is increasingly arguing that frontier AI itself will become a critical biosecurity tool.
