This week the big stories are all around how AI’s skills are outpacing our ability to govern them. We’re looking at the researchers who used AI to design 16 new viruses, Anthropic loosening Fable 5’s biology limits while keeping scientists locked out, and a gym-booking agent in Australia that hacked a reservation system and bumped a stranger off the waitlist without being asked.
The trend: Researchers have used AI to design 16 working viruses that don’t exist in nature, the first time a language model has produced complete, functional genomes.
The details: Scientists at Stanford and the Arc Institute trained two models on millions of genomes, then asked them to design new versions of Phi X-174, a small virus that infects E. coli bacteria. The models produced 16 viable viruses, some of which replicated faster than the original and were different enough to count as entirely new species. The new viruses were tested on, and beat, E. coli strains that were resistant to the original natural virus.
Why it matters: The team kept viruses that infect humans, animals, and plants out of the training data, so the models wouldn’t generate anything that threatens people. One of the two models (Evo 2) is open source and the work is moving fast, so expect more results like this along with growing pressure for biosafety testing.
Anthropic improves Fable' 5’s biology safeguards
The trend:Anthropic rewrote the safety rules behind Fable 5’s biology guardrails, cutting the rate at which users were sent to a weaker model by roughly 85%, meaning that Fable 5 will now answer a wider range of health and educational questions rather than switching to a weaker model.
The details: At launch, Fable 5’s classifiers blocked almost all biology related questions, sending users to the less capable Opus 5, due to concerns that Fable 5’s biological (and cybersecurity) skills were too dangerous for public use. The rewrite changes how the models differentiate safe requests from risky ones. Requests covering virology, toxicology, and molecular design are still blocked, so the model isn’t usable for professional research or drug development. Anthropic says its own assessments show Fable 5 could give bad actors meaningful help towards biological weapons, which is why it’s loosening limits slowly, as the classifiers improve.
Why it matters: This is close to what most people want from frontier models: help reading lab reports, but not building biological superweapons. However, legitimate researchers are still locked out, and Anthropic admits its still working on trusted access pathways for those use cases.
OpenAI first device will be a donut shaped smart speaker, roughly the size of a hockey puck and designed be carried from room to room. The $300 donut is coming in 2027 with cameras, microphones and moving parts meant to anthropomorphize it. OpenAI says it will learn about you over time and works like an always-on version of ChatGPT’s voice mode.
An Australian man asked his OpenClaw agent to book him into a popular gym class, and it found a vulnerability in the booking software that let it reserve slots weeks past the gym’s cutoff. To move up the waitlist for the class, the agent cancelled another member’s reservation, as the booking API had no authorization checks for cancelling other people’s spots. Its the first known case of its kind, happening in same month OpenAI and Anthropic both disclosed that models had hacked real organizations during testing.
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