The AI vulnerability race has begun, and the timeline is alarmingly short. Advanced AI models can already identify security flaws seven times faster than human teams. Cybersecurity firms estimate that organizations have only three to five months before attackers gain widespread access to similar AI-powered exploit capabilities.

Leading AI labs are strategically releasing high-risk capabilities, like cybersecurity exploits, to trusted defenders before a general public release. This pattern, seen with Anthropic and OpenAI, aims to harden systems against potential misuse, with biosafety likely being the next frontier for this approach.

Mythos is a general-purpose system also proficient in biology. How society, governments, and companies manage the risks and norms of AI in cybersecurity is a direct preview of the much higher-stakes challenge of managing future AI-driven biological threats.

Current concerns focus on AI agents using existing bioinformatics tools. The more advanced threat is agentic AI that can code and create novel, personalized biological tools on demand, moving beyond a static toolset to a dynamic threat generation capability.

Instead of releasing new AI models to everyone simultaneously, a better strategy is providing early, privileged access to trusted defenders like vaccine developers. This allows them to build countermeasures and create a 'defensive uplift' advantage before malicious actors can exploit new capabilities.

The belief that nature represents the ceiling of pathogen danger is false. Just as humans engineer materials stronger than any found in nature, AI can be used to design viruses that are far more transmissible or lethal than their natural counterparts.

AI models are better at finding bad code than writing good code. This capability will rapidly uncover vulnerabilities in open-source, custom, and vendor software that would have otherwise taken 10 years to find. This creates an urgent, large-scale need for patching across all industries.

Advanced AI models capable of finding complex code vulnerabilities are expected to be publicly available within months. This puts enterprises in an urgent race to find and patch their own security holes before malicious actors use the very same tools to exploit them.

Valthos CEO Kathleen, a biodefense expert, warns that AI's primary threat in biology is asymmetry. It drastically reduces the cost and expertise required to engineer a pathogen. The primary concern is no longer just sophisticated state-sponsored programs but small groups of graduate students with lab access, massively expanding the threat landscape.