Startup fights AI bioweapons with AI defense

Frontier labs warn of AI bioweapon risk

Frontier AI labs have warned that their technology could help develop dangerous bioweapons. Now a startup is building a defense against that threat.

Radical Numerics launches Omnii Defense

On Wednesday, Radical Numerics announced Omnii Defense, an edge model designed to flag natural and AI-engineered pathogens using a laptop and USB gene sequencer. It runs without internet connection.

Cofounder sees coming biodefense arms race

Eric Nguyen, cofounder and CEO of Radical Numerics, says he sees a coming arms race in biodefense similar to cybersecurity, where threat actors and defenders leverage AI.

“We felt that the biosecurity space was far behind on the defense side.”

How Omnii Defense assigns threat scores

Omnii Defense makes multiple predictions about a sequence, including odds of it being pathogenic or AI-generated. It assigns a genome a threat score between zero and one combining unnaturalness with functional predictions.

AI models outperform older detection tools

Earlier biodefense tools like Felix compare sequences against libraries of known organisms. AI models learn patterns in sequences associated with biological function, recognizing similarities even when genetic spelling changes.

Detection alone is not enough

Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, cautions that detecting a signal is still a big leap from determining whether a pathogen has real consequence or was engineered.