Yeah. I don't think the cited RAND paper really backs up the author's conclusions.

Seeing lines like

> We were not able to determine whether this scenario [engineered pathogens] presents a likely extinction risk for humanity, but we cannot rule out the possibility.

and more generally

> Extinction threats are immensely challenging but cannot be ruled out.

in the RAND report is pretty terrifying!

And the person who is being cited as the expert on viral synthesis who claims to have trained frontier models seems to just be wrong about that? It doesn't seem at all like he's trained anything close to a frontier model unless there's something about his work history that I'm missing.