It was only in preparation for the Spiez conference that the researchers started to explore how artificial intelligence could be used to design toxic molecules. Until now they have used a commercial de novo molecule generator, MegaSyn, which is guided by machine learning model predictions of bioactivity in order to find new therapeutic inhibitors of targets for human diseases. The generative model was designed to penalise predicted toxicity and to reward predicted target activity. As usual, therapeutic drugs are carefully tested for toxicity. If, for instance, a very promising new drug to treat hypertension has been developed, but it damages one of the important heart channels, it cannot be used since it will be too dangerous.

It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of "bad actor" mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The paper had us at The Verge a little shook, too.

An artificial intelligence model was able to create 40,000 chemical weapons compounds in just six hours, after being given the task by researchers. A team of scientists were using AI to look for compounds that could be used to cure disease, and part of this involves filtering out any that could kill a human. As part of a conference on potentially negative implications of new technology, biotech startup Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, from Raleigh, North Carolina, 'flipped a switch' in its AI algorithm, and had it find the most lethal compounds. The team wanted to see just how quickly and easily an artificial intelligence algorithm could be abused, if it were set on a negative, rather than positive task. Once in'bad mode' the AI was able to invent thousands of new chemical combinations, many of which resembled the most dangerous nerve agents in use today, according to a report by The Verge.