You can literally send an email to one of hundreds of companies that do exactly this. They have no way of knowing whether you're asking them to synthesize a virus or a drug candidate or what.
Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.
[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
Synthetic biology is one of those things.
LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.
Without LLMs, a reasonable security apparatus would be:
Step 1. Disallow dissemination and synthesis of known pathogens
Step 2. Watch closely anyone with the decades of training required to come up with their own pathogen
No.
No, the barriers I'm talking about aren't coming down. Not quickly anyway.
No, nobody assumed this was the "highest and last barrier". That's the point you keep missing.
LLMs are not "solving" the rate-limiting step here. It only looks that way if you don't know what's involved.
“No no some other step is hard. I won’t say what it is. No it’s not getting easier, miraculously, but I can’t say what it is.”
There you go!
Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.
That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.
I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.
The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow those barriers are coming down fast"
And you're saying: "There are still barriers"
Both are true, but only one is helpful for thinking about the future. The other is hardly even helpful for thinking about the present, and I've never seen a quasi-intelligent person do it in lieu of some other motivations in their reasoning.
For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people" to a working virus?
You can provide a range for each if you'd like.
In the year 1800 – how long?
1950?
2020?
2026?
2050?
2200?
They really just synthesize anything for you?
You: "No, of course not. I once went on a website to buy a drug, and they made go to a doctor and get a prescription and send it to them"
The black market exists -- but comes with black market problems.
Glad we agree that there are labs that will solve very hard parts of creating a novel virus, either by accident or by negligence.
Here's a red team exercise where researchers successfully bought fragments of the best known pathogen in the world, never mind a novel one.
What reasonable precautions failed to catch this but we could expect to catch a novel virus that "kinda looks like" a known virus?
https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/08/shouldnt-be-easy-buy-syn...
The shredding, mutating, reassembling is all it took to get the most well known pathogen in the world by the controls that you are suggesting are sufficiently tight
* there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…
You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
What step is missing?
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Answers: No, no, and no.
Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.