Re:Policy on the AI Exponential
by simianwords on Thursday June 11, 2026 @01:48AM
(#48486642)
This is a ridiculous stance to take. That LLMs are simultaneously negative value but can also help synthesise bioweapons. It’s the sort of stance you take when you already feel ideologically against AI. I don’t think it’s coherent.
>This is a ridiculous stance to take.
I encourage you to be more curious. We're just talking. We would learn more from each other without these strong statements.
Is synthesizing bioweapons positive or negative value ?
It's more about information availability rather than intelligence. An LLM has had access to more information during its training period than you'd ever even come across over a hundred lifetimes. It has been trained on billions of books and articles across every single subject that exists on the planet. Can you imagine what real intelligence could do with all that information?
You wouldn't ask a chemistry professor to write code. So just because LLMs create negative value for software development doesn't mean that they can't be helpful for bioweapons synthesis, especially considering the range of chemistry and biology sources Anthropic would have fed to its LLM that wouldn't be publicly accessible. The LLM doesn't even need to be particularly accurate so long as the amateur bioweapons researcher takes adequate precautions before following its instructions and does some background research beforehand.