‘The governance does not exist’: AI just designed 16 viruses from scratch

Photo: A scientist safely harvesting a virus that was grown for research purposes – 2013. Photo credit: CDC via Unsplash. Article by Ana Maria Constantin. The Next Web – August 7, 2026. Research article: Science.

Researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute reported the milestone on Thursday in the journal Science, in work detailed by The New York Times. Using AI trained on genetic code rather than text, they generated the genomes of 16 new viruses. Each is a bacteriophage, a virus that infects only bacteria. The technique borrows straight from chatbots. Models called Evo 1 and Evo 2 work like ChatGPT for biology. They were trained on millions of genomes to learn the “grammar” of DNA. Prompted with a fragment of a natural virus, they wrote out full genetic blueprints for new ones. […]

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