The Mitigation Gap
Audio overview of The Mitigation Gap — AI-enabled biosecurity threats and what current safeguards miss.
Companion to article: The Mitigation Gap
Biosecurity experts believe current safeguards reduce AI-enabled catastrophic biorisk by over 70%. They are wrong. A 2025 study by the Forecasting Research Institute surveyed 46 domain experts and 22 superforecasters on the annual probability of a human-caused epidemic killing 100,000+ people or causing $1 trillion+ in damages. The baseline risk: 0.3% per year. Conditional on AI reaching specific capability milestones, that number jumps fivefold to 1.5%. The technical evidence shows both primary safeguards — nucleic acid synthesis screening and AI model guardrails — are brittle and bypassable against the novel threats AI now enables.