Biology news · Silicon AI News

October 20262 stories

UK puts £100M into an AI lab against biological threats

OpenAI and Anthropic add up to £200M in model credits, and Google DeepMind joins as a research partner. The lab is part of a wider AI package, with £120M more for the AI Security Institute, ahead of next week’s Budget.

On October 24, the UK government said it will set up the AI Biosecurity Lab, an independent non-profit. It will use AI to spot biological threats early and speed up vaccines and treatments. The government puts in £100 million. OpenAI and Anthropic give model credits and access, not cash.

4 min read

Safety & SecurityOct 1

DeepMind watermarks AI-designed proteins for biosecurity

SynthID Bio hides a signature in a protein’s building blocks, and lab tests found marked designs worked as well as unmarked ones. It could help DNA makers tell designs from trusted AI tools apart from the rest.

Google DeepMind introduced SynthID Bio on September 30, a way to watermark proteins designed by AI without breaking them. In lab tests on three targets, watermarked protein binders matched unwatermarked ones on how often they worked, how tightly they bound and how varied they were, DeepMind says. It is sharing the code, lab data and model weights with researchers.

4 min read

September 20261 story

AI ModelsSep 24

Anthropic says Claude found a new enzyme system

It has CRISPR-like repeats, but what it does is still unknown.

Anthropic said on September 23 that Claude agents, searching huge DNA databases, spotted an overlooked enzyme system in viruses that infect bacteria. It has evenly spaced repeats like those in CRISPR. Anthropic’s own lab made a first test, but the work is not peer-reviewed.

5 min read