AI is the next major biodefense tech priority
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how biological threats can be created, detected, and countered. Following its June 4, 2026, public meeting, “Pandora’s Prompt: AI and the Biological Threat,” the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at the Atlantic Council established AI as the sixteenth technology priority in The Apollo Program for Biodefense. The Commission assesses AI’s offensive biological risks and defensive opportunities and calls on the United States, working with industry and international partners, to invest in AI-enabled disease surveillance and diagnostics, medical countermeasure development, microbial forensics and attribution, model evaluation and safeguards, and adaptive nucleic acid synthesis screening.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a sector-specific technology but one that accelerates discovery, analysis, and design across biology, chemistry, and all other technical domains nearly simultaneously. AI fundamentally transforms the biological threat landscape. AI systems capable of analyzing, synthesizing, and drawing inferences from vast biological data sets compress timelines to develop capabilities that once required years of specialized expertise and costly laboratory infrastructure. Large language models can now provide meaningful technical guidance across the pathogen engineering process, and biological design tools can design new proteins, predict how genetic changes will affect an organism, and ultimately engineer molecules that never existed in nature.
Read the full brief, an addendum to the Apollo Program, below.
about the authors
The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at Atlantic Council is a privately funded entity established in 2014 to provide a comprehensive assessment of the state of US biodefense efforts and to issue recommendations that foster change. Since 2015, the Commission has advocated for the uptake of its recommendations at the highest levels of the US government, through additional meetings, reports, and other activities. This is the only such body of bipartisan, former high-level policymakers to do so.
Explore the programs
The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at the Atlantic Council provides a comprehensive assessment of the state of US biodefense and recommends changes to policy and law that strengthen national biodefense while optimizing biodefense resources.
The Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security works to develop sustainable, nonpartisan strategies to address the most important security challenges facing the United States and the world.
Image: An AI chip illustration. Igor Omilaev via Unsplash