Geopolitics and technological advances are making this a riskier world for bioweapons. Jen Kirby, of Vox, writes:  "The scientists trained the software with some 2 million molecules from a public database, and then modeled for specific toxic traits. In just six hours, the AI generated some 40,000 molecules that met the scientists' criteria, meaning that, based on their molecular structure, they all look quite a lot like toxic, chemical agents. The AI designed VX. It designed other known toxic agents. It even designed entirely new molecules that the scientists hadn't programmed for, creating a sketch for potentially lethal and novel chemical compounds.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The experiment was computational - a digital recipe for molecules like VX, not a physical creation of it or any other substance. But Ekins and his team used open source, publicly available data. The AI they used was also largely open source as well; they just tweeked the models a little bit. Ekins was horrified. What he and his colleague had thought was a banal experiment ended up creating a cookbook for chemical agents. 'If we could do this,' Elkin said, 'what's to stop anyone else doing it?"