AI Reports · GovAI (Oxford) · 2026-10-17 · Report / white paper
Threat Modeling Dual-Use AI Capabilities and the Risk of Bioterrorism December 2025 GovAI Report Luca Righetti Several frontier AI companies test their AI systems for dual-use biological capabilities
Several frontier AI companies test their AI systems for dual-use biological capabilities. This report proposes a framework for converting such capability evaluations into risk assessments, drawing on historical case studies, expert elicitation and reference class forecasting. It estimates that if AI raised the share of STEM bachelor's graduates able to synthesize influenza-complexity pathogens by 10 percentage points and enabled operational attack plans, the annual probability of a lone-wolf-caused epidemic could rise from 0.15% to 1.0%, or about 12,000 expected deaths a year (~$100B), with high uncertainty.