AI industry unprepared for potential catastrophe, says Gautam Mukunda

Gautam Mukunda, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and lecturer at the Yale School of Management, has been sounding an increasingly urgent alarm: the AI industry’s approach to catastrophic risk is fundamentally broken, and the consequences could be biological in nature. The biological threat no one wants to talk about Mukunda has zeroed in on the intersection of AI and biology, specifically the ability of AI systems to generate DNA sequences that could be used to create dangerous pathogens. A Microsoft study from October 2025 found that AI-generated DNA sequences could escape detection by commercial screening tools with as low as a 32% success rate. Put another way: roughly two-thirds of the time, existing tools failed to flag potentially dangerous synthetic DNA created with AI assistance. Current screening for synthesized DNA is largely voluntary. Companies that manufacture synthetic DNA can choose whether or not to screen orders against databases of known dangerous sequences. Mukunda has argued repeatedly that this opt-in system creates obvious gaps, especially as AI makes it easier to design novel sequences that do not match anything in existing threat databases. Self-regulation is n...