Writing in the Guardian, Annie Jacobsen argues that artificial intelligence is simultaneously making it easier to create biological weapons and offering powerful new tools to defend public health, creating an urgent race between offensive misuse and defensive innovation. She warns that AI systems can now help malicious actors navigate complex biological knowledge, troubleshoot lab techniques and design experiments that once required years of specialist training, meaning the threat is no longer hypothetical. The core challenge, she says, is whether public health authorities can deploy AI defensively as quickly as bad actors exploit it offensively.

On the defensive side, Jacobsen highlights the World Health Organization's use of AI-driven surveillance, particularly a system called Eios (Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources), based at the WHO's Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin. Unlike traditional epidemic tracking, which relies on official case data that can take days or weeks to compile, Eios scans millions of websites, social media posts and local news reports in multiple languages to detect outbreak signals in real time. Jacobsen argues that this speed is critical, since early detection of the first few cases can be the difference between containing an outbreak and facing a full-blown epidemic or pandemic, and she stresses that laws and safeguards must keep pace with rapidly advancing biological engineering technology.