The AI Safety Demo That Caused Alarm in Washington

Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? Late last year, an AI researcher opened his laptop and showed me something jaw-dropping. Lucas Hansen, co-founder of nonprofit CivAI, was showing me an app he built that coaxed popular AI models into giving what appeared to be detailed step-by-step instructions for creating poliovirus and anthrax. Any safeguards that these models had were stripped away.