I can’t say that, from a purely economic perspective, the $12,000 or so and several years of investment I poured into earning a master’s degree in international relations from the University of North Georgia a couple of years ago has paid off.
However, occasionally, one of the concepts embedded in the obscene amount of assigned reading materials is useful for analyzing current events.
One such concept, a perennial problem in international law, is that of attribution following an attack by a state or non-state actor, whether digital or kinetic.
The two-fold problem of attribution is:
- Who did it?
- Who is ultimately responsible for it?
Via European Journal of International Law (emphasis added):
International law has changed significantly since the times in which the individual was regarded as a mere object of inter-state affairs. States remain the prime subjects of international law, but many other actors now shape international relations. Moreover, many rules ‘are directly concerned with regulating the position and activities of individuals; and many more indirectly affect them’.1 There persists, however, a gap in the regulation of the use of force by non-state actors and the consequences, if any, for the states that facilitate it…
States are obliged under customary and treaty law to prevent the activities of non-state actors from breaching the rights of third states. These obligations, particularly in the domain of human rights and environmental law, comprise taking all means reasonably available to the state in order to prevent unlawful non-state actors’ conduct on their territory and, in certain circumstances, even extra-territorially.
Related: Google Seeks Approval to Release 32 Million AI-Bred Mosquitoes on California, Florida
The attribution problem most often crops up in the context of cyber-attacks conducted by non-state actors that may or may not have had state sponsorship, or at least tacit permission.
However, we’re rapidly entering a new era in which bioweapon manufacturing — hitherto exclusively the purview of only a handful of tightly regulated biolabs throughout the world — is becoming, thanks to AI, highly doable for rogue state and non-state actors, even ones with limited resources.
Here are a couple of recent stories on this phenomenon, one via an academic journal and the other via the Newspaper of Record™ (which, believe it or not, sometimes actually does good work in between lobbying for child trannyism and pushing experimental gene therapies marketed as vaccines).
Via AI Frontiers (emphasis added):
Virology knowledge has been limited to a small number of experts. Expertise in dual-use fields like virology is difficult to attain, with people completing multiple degrees and dedicating their careers to reaching the forefront of research. Where knowledge is publicly available, the jargon-heavy literature is largely indecipherable to most people outside the field. To perform research involving biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) pathogens—such as SARS, anthrax, or H5N1 influenza—researchers must clear a series of approvals, including facility certification, security clearances, specialized training, and ongoing medical surveillance. Only then can they get access to these pathogens and begin acquiring the tacit skills needed to work with them
These high barriers to entry have limited the pool of people with access to powerful dual-use knowledge, keeping the chances of misuse low. But rapid developments in publicly available AI systems now risk turning amateurs into capable threat actors.
LLMs outperform human virologists in their areas of expertise on a new benchmark. This week the Center for AI Safety published a report with SecureBio that details a new benchmark for virology capabilities in publicly available frontier models. Alarmingly, the research suggests that several advanced LLMs now outperform most human virology experts in troubleshooting practical work in wet labs…
Bioweapon risk depends on certain factors: the number of people with access to bioweapon skills, the intent to create a bioweapon, and the severity of harm that a bioweapon could cause. Risk has so far been low, as there are a few hundred virologists from top virology programs, and they have not felt so inclined to create a pandemic. However, if these skills are available to hundreds of millions of people via LLMs, the probability of an intentional release grows by orders of magnitude.
Via The New York Times (emphasis added):
One evening last summer, Dr. David Relman went cold at his laptop as an A.I. chatbot told him how to plan a massacre.
A microbiologist and biosecurity expert at Stanford University, Dr. Relman had been hired by an artificial intelligence company to pressure-test its product before it was released to the public. That night in the scientist's home office, the chatbot explained how to modify an infamous pathogen in a lab so that it would resist known treatments.
Worse, the bot described in vivid detail how to release the superbug, identifying a security lapse in a large public transit system, Dr. Relman said, asking The New York Times to withhold the name of the pathogen and other specifics for fear of inspiring an attack. The bot outlined a plan to maximize casualties and minimize the chances of being caught.
Dr. Relman was so shaken he took a walk to clear his head.
“It was answering questions that I hadn’t thought to ask it, with this level of deviousness and cunning that I just found chilling,” said Dr. Relman, who has also advised the federal government on biological threats. He declined to disclose which chatbot produced the plot, citing a confidentiality agreement with its maker. The company added some safety guardrails to the product after his testing, he said, though he felt they were insufficient.
Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. In recent months, some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. Some have even brainstormed ways to evade detection.
Related: Bird Flu Engineered to Infect Humans Could Be Lab-Produced ‘in Months,’ Former CDC Director Says
So then the question becomes: what responsibility, if any, do states have under international law as it currently exists to not only refrain themselves from bioweapons production but also to prevent non-state actors within their sovereign borders from developing potentially world-ending bioweapons in their basement using Claude, which can easily cross borders beyond any capacity to control if they’re infectious agents?
We’re not in Kansas anymore.
As has always been true, the law lags far behind technological development.
The difference is that the novel technology of 2026 poses a much more existential threat to the human race than the steam engine did.
